"Gertrude Stein's Paris Salon and Its Satellites:
Avant-Garde and Non-Avant-Garde Innovators"
AMERICAN LITERATURE (2)
COURSE CODE: AN23001BA, AN128005BA
TIME & PLACE: Wed 16. 00 – 17. 40 Rm 111, Mbld
INSTRUCTOR: Lenke Németh, nemeth.lenke@arts.unideb.hu
Office phone: 512-900/22069
Office Hours: Wed 13. 00 – 14. 00 and Thu 12.00 – 13. 00, Rm 118, Mbld
COURSE DECRIPTION
A fabled place where American expatriate writers met the distinguished group of avant-garde
artists, painters, composers, dancers, and film directors of the interwar years, Gertrude
Stein’s by now legendary salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris played a pivotal role in shaping
American modernism. Herself an American experimental writer as well as mentor and critic
of a whole generation of young and fledgling American authors, Stein was regarded as the
“Mother of Modernism,” who had a decisive impact on American literary Modernism not
only in the 1920s but also on subsequent avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements
emerging before and after the 1960s.
This multigenre course has been designed to offer students the most significant modernist
literary texts by writers (1) who clearly benefited from Stein’s guidance (Ernest Hemingway
and F. Scott Fitzgerald) or were harbingers of modernism (Susan Glaspell and Kate Chopin).
The list of authors selected for this course will also include (2) non-avant-garde yet
innovative voices (Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost) and (3) a sample of
alternative modernists (Langston Hughes and e. e. cummings). A further aim of the course is
to familiarize students with the vigor and vibrancy of the cultural and intellectual scene that
inspired and shaped the Modernist sensibility, captured in a recent cinematic work of art,
Midnight in Paris (2011), which also forms background material for the course.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Attendance and active participation in class discussions.
Quizzes on the assigned reading.
Midterm paper will include text recognition tasks as well as brief essay questions pertaining to
the material covered up to that time.
Endterm paper will check your familiarity with the works and their contexts discussed during
the semester.
Oral Presentation is a 5-10-minute commentary on some aspect of a selected literary work or
critical study related to the assigned readings on the agenda. The presentation should be
delivered in front of the class in a manner that your fellow students will focus on what you
present and how you present. The topic of the presentation will be negotiated with the tutor;
yet, you will need to find relevant material for an effectively delivered presentation.
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Class participation 20%
Quizzes 10%
Presentation 20%
Midterm paper 20%
Endterm Paper 30%
COURSE SCHEDULE
(1) Feb 19
Orientation
(2) Feb 26
POETRY SAMPLE (I)
E. A. Robinson (1869-1935), "Richard Cory," “Miniver Cheevy"
Robert Frost (1874-1963), "After Apple-Picking," "The Road Not Taken,"
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,"
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Chapters I and II in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(1933)
(3) March 5
Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), Trifles (1916)
(4) March 12
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Great Gatsby (1925)
(5)March 19
CONSULTATION WEEK
(6) March 26 THE SHORT STORY
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936),
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), Willa Cather (1873-1947), "Neighbor Rosicky" (1932),
Kate Chopin, (1850-1904), “A Respectable Woman” (1894)
(7)Apr 2
Midterm Paper
(8) Apr 9
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
(9) Apr 16
William Faulkner (1897-1962), The Sound and the Fury (1929)
(10) Apr 23
POETRY SAMPLE (II)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972), "In a Station of the Metro"
Amy Lowell (1874-1925), "Patterns" E. E. Cummings (1894-1962), "anyone lived in a
pretty how town," "Up into the Silence the Green," William Carlos Williams (1883-1963),
"Spring and All," "The Red Wheelbarrow," Langston Hughes (1902-1967), “The Negro
Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,”
(11) Apr 30
Thornton Wilder, Our Town (1938)
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
Chapter VII
(12) May 7
Screening of Midnight in Paris (2011, dir. Woody Allen)
(13) May 14
Endterm Paper
(14) May 21
Closing
Required Texts
AN 305 Course packet and the novels are available in the Institute library.
Chopin, Kate, “ A Respectable Woman” (1894)
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/862/
Glaspell, Susan. Trifles (1916)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10623/10623-h/10623-h.htm
Stein,
Gertrude.
The
Autobiography
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608711.txt
of
Alice
B.
Toklas
(1933)
A Short List of Suggested Secondary Sources
Horton, W. Rod and Herbert W. Edwards. Backgrounds of American Literary Thought. New
York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1967.
Országh, László and Virágos Zsolt. Az amerikai irodalom története. Eötvös, 1997.
Virágos, Zsolt. The Modernists and Others: The American Literary Culture in the Age of the Modernist
Revolution. Debrecen: Institute of English and American Studies, 2006.
N.B. The Institute Library holds a large number of reference books as well as monographs
on the authors selected for the course.
Absences: If you must miss a class because of illness or emergency, please let me know, and
arrange to complete any work missed.