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This course will examine both canonized and contemporary classics encompassing American ideology, politics and culture from the 19th century to the present. Mark Twain’s portrait of American boyhood, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, delineates the American frontier as well as offering a vision of the American character as pragmatic, provincial, and inventive. L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (usually reprinted as The Wizard of Oz), often billed as the first American fairy tale, resonates to the present day in American music, film, musicals, and politics. J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which explores a few tormented days in the life of an unhappy adolescent, is, like Twain’s work, an example of the vernacular, a constantly evolving style in American literature. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-prizewinning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, presents the crisis of small-town America enmeshed in depression-era poverty and the Jim Crow racial divide. Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep is sometimes billed as a girl’s version of The Catcher in the Rye—the book also paints a portrait of adolescent angst in boarding school—but Prep also encompasses bigger themes that continue to challenge the United States and the rest of the world: how do young people negotiate an intricate social life involving complicated, unknown codes for race, class, and expectations?
As we read these works, we’ll look at their impact on American and world culture. In 2015, for example, Harper Lee’s long-unpublished novel, Go Set a Watchman, another agonized depiction of America and race, relevant to the Black Lives Matter movement and numerous issues in Trump’s America, first appeared. Students are encouraged to explore the ways in which writers both describe and sense significant patterns and developments in American literature. For the foreign language classroom, these novels are within the range of students from eighth grade up; we can also discuss current controversies over “simplified texts” in the classroom, and there exist a number of websites on second-language teaching of most of these texts.
Requirements: Read all texts; the first two may be found online. Give a five-minute presentation about how you would like to teach any aspect of one of our readings, and write two short papers on assigned topics. Your presentation may form the basis for one of your papers.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
The Wizard of Oz (1900)
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Prep (2005) |
