SEMINARS
TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
READING LIST
WEEK 1: Discussion of seminar work, grading policy and exams
WEEK 2: E. Hemingway, “Hills like White Elephants”, Heath Anthology, 2nd edition,
vol. II
WEEK 3: F.S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
WEEK 4: Modernist Poetry: from Heath and Norton Anthologies

G. Stein: “Susie Asado”, from “Tender Buttons”

E. Pound: “In a Station of the Metro”, “A Few Don’ts”

W. C. Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow”, “These”, “Spring and All”, “The Great
Figure”
WEEK 5: Z. N. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Chapter 2 and 3, Norton
Anthology, 3rd edition, vol. II, p. 1438, or 4th edition, vol. II, p. 1428
WEEK 6: E. O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Norton Anthology, 3rd edition, vol.
II, p. 1303
WEEK 7: W. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (multiple copies in the library)
WEEK 8: T. Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Norton Anthology, 3rd edition, vol.
II, p. 1820
WEEK 9: L. Erdrich, “Saint Marie” from Love Medicine in Heath Anthology, 2nd
edition, vol. II or from multiple copies in the library
WEEK 10: T. Morrison, Beloved (multiple copies in the library) (film)
WEEK 11: T. Morrison, Beloved (continued)
WEEK 12: D. DeLillo, from White Noise, Chapter 6, 9, 10 & 21 (p.109-123), (multiple
copies in the library)
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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Outline of American Literature
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/oaltoc.htm
A very useful hyperlinked site on the history of American Literature created by American
Informational Agency, gives interesting information on various trends such as
traditionalism, neoclassism, Midwestern Realism, etc.
Key Sites on American Literature
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/amlitweb.htm
A collection of the most comprehensive sites on American Literature maintained at
American colleges and universities, compiled by the Department of State International
Information programs.
American Studies Web
http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/webcourses.html#lit
This page points to sites on the Internet dealing with American literature and History, it
contains essays, syllabi, bibliographies, reviews, online journals, analysis of online texts.
Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle at University of California, Santa Barbara
http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp
The earliest and probably largest list of links on humanitarian topics.
Kingwood College Library. American Cultural History: the 20th century.
http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decades.html
A Webguide for each decade of the 20th century, providing historical and cultural
background.
American Authors on the Web
http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/AmeLit.html
A very good hyperlinked site on American authors founded in a 1996, it presents a
chronological listing of almost 800 authors and included the authors’ short biographies,
works, critical essays, etc.
The Internet Public Library
http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/bin/literit
Online literary criticism collection. American literature: 20th century.
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th edition, vol.D: 1914-1945; vol.E:
since 1945
http://www.norton.com/
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th edition
http://www.college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e
The site provides a timeline, biography of authors and links to academic sites for
particular authors.
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Electronic Poetry Center, SUNY Buffalo.
http://epc.buffalo.edu
The site includes 150 American poets.
Poets.org – The Academy of American Poets
http://poets.org/index
This site provides biography and links to resources on American poets.
American Dramatists
http://www.harborhs.santacruz.k12.ca.us/depts/library/dramatists/html
The site includes biography and links to resources on E. O’Neill and T. Williams.
The Mississippi Writers Page – University of Mississippi
http://www.olemiss.edu/mwp/
A very good site to start on W. Faulkner
Internet School Library Media Center (ISLMC) African American Writers Page. Online e-texts.
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/afroonline.htm
A wealth of electronic texts by African-American writers and extensive bibliography of
literary criticism about them.
African-American Writers: A Celebration at Middle Tennessee State University
http://www.mtsu.edu/~vvesper/afam.html
Meta-site including links to many general resources, as well as to individual AfricanAmerican writers.
Voices from the Gaps. Women Writers of Color at the University of Minnesota
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/newsite/index.htm
A major site on North American women writers from different ethnic backgrounds.
Storytellers: Native-American Authors On-line
http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers
A site dedicated to Native-American writers.
The Literary Encyclopedia and Literary Dictionary
http://www.litencyc.com
The site provides author profiles, text profiles and topic essays in a series of user-friendly
indexed databases. Links to other useful resources can be found at the foot of each entry.
Postmodernism is/in Fiction
http://www.english.pomona.edu/pomo/
A site dedicated to the exploration of contemporary writers. Original essays and links on
Acker, Auster, DeLillo, Marquez, Gibson, Hagedom, Morrison, Powers, Pynchon, Reed,
and Rushdie.
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Grading policy:
The grading is based on continuous assessment. It consists of 5 components, each
bringing a number of points. The maximum points are 100. The pass level is 60 points.
Class participation:
Oral presentation:
Project “The reception of 20th century American writers in Bulgaria”:
Mid-term quiz:
Final exam:
10 points
10 points
10 points
20 points
50 points
Project “The reception of 20th century American writers in Bulgaria”:
Choose one of the following authors. Your task is to find all works by the author of your
choice translated in Bulgarian, and all critical works (reviews, articles) about that
author in Bulgarian. Include all necessary information concerning name of author/s,
publisher, year of publishing, place of publishing. The best place to start is the catalogue
of the National Library. Please, present your results in a neat, typed form or in electronic
form - on a floppy disk. The deadline for the project – last week of the semester.

Note: ‘p’ stands for poetry & ‘d’ for drama
25. John Steinbeck
Realism and Naturalism
26. Sinclair Lewis
(1900-1914)
1. Edith Wharton
27. John Dos Passos
2. Jack London
28. Thornton Wilder/d
3. Theodore Dreiser
29. Clifford Odets/d
4. Ellen Glasgow
30. Lillian Hellman/d
5. Willa Cather
31. Tennessee Williams/d
6. W.E.B.Du Bois
32. Arthur Miller/d
7. James Weldon
33. Edward Albee/d
Johnson
34. Allen Ginsberg/p
35. Catherine Anne Porter
Modernism (1914-1945)
8. Ernest Hemingway
36. Eudora Welty
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald
37. Jack Kerouac/p
10. Gertrude Stein/p
38. William Burroughs/p
11. T. S. Eliot/p
39. Adrienne Rich/p
12. Ezra Pound/p
40. Richard Wright
13. Hart Crane/p
Experimentation (since
14. William C. Williams
1945)
/p
41. Flannery O’Connor
15. H.D.[Hilda
42. Ralph Ellison
Doolittle]/p
43. Lorraine Hansberry/d
16. e. e. cummings/p
44. James Baldwin
17. Alain Locke
45. Toni Morrison
18. Langston Hughes
46. Alice Walker
19. Zora Neale Hurston
47. Amiri Baraka/p
20. Eugene O’Neill
48. Maya Angelou
21. Susan Glaspell
49. Ishmael Reed
22. William Faulkner
50. Philip Roth
23. Eudora Welty
51. Saul Bellow
24. Michael Gold
52. Bernard Malamud
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
N. Scott Momaday
Louise Erdrich
Leslie Marmon Silko
Maxine Hong
Kingston
Joyce Carol Oates
E.L. Doctorow
Vladimir Nabokov
John Cheever
J.D. Salinger
John Barth
Norman Mailer
Irwin Shaw
John Updike
Thomas Pynchon
Joseph Heller
Kurt Vonnegut
Sam Shepard/d
August Wilson/d
Marsha Norman/d
David Mamet/d
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