ANGLOPHONE LITERATURES

Professor Mariya Shymchyshyn

5/17 Laboratorna st., room 1009
Office hours: Mondays 14:00 – 15:00 and by appointment

COURSE DESCRIPTION
The course examines different narratives of Anglophone literatures with special
attention given to cultural and historical contexts. A comparative analysis of
different ethnic and national literary traditions (African American, Asian
American, British, South African, Nigerian, and etc.) will inform class
discussions, as well as issues of gender, race, ideology, and class.

COURSE OBJECTIVES
 to acquaint you with “canonical” as well as “uncanonical” Anglophone
writers and narratives;
 to deepen your knowledge of the cultural and historical contexts of
Anglophone literatures;
 to inform you with the array of resources for the study of Anglophone
literatures, including Web sites;
 to sharpen your skills in analyzing literary texts and using literary terms
accurately;
 to define some of the principal themes and problems that emerge from
studies in the history of Anglophone cultures, and discuss the
manifestations of those themes and problems in selected literary texts.
 to identify selected instances of classical Anglophone writing, and discuss,
in general term, how they exemplify the historical period from which they
derive.
 to demonstrate an ability to closely analyze selected passages of literary
texts, and an ability to use such analyses to both illuminate and complicate
a reading of the texts in which they occur;
  to write a short critical essay about a literary topic, an essay that develops
and defends a critical claim (or thesis), and does so in a manner that is, in
general, grammatically and rhetorically correct and effective;
 to identify, find, and use basic secondary sources to further the reading and
writing required in and beyond this course.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Reading. You are expected to keep up with the readings listed on the syllabus. In
addition there could be one or two additional readings assigned. These need to be
read before each class on each day the readings are listed.

Attendance and discussion. You will be expected to be present each time the
course meets. The course will revolve around our in-class discussions and I
expect each one of you to take active part in discussion each day. It will be
through our development of a common discussion that we accomplish our
intellectual work in this course.

Each seminar we have new critical reading (i.e. the essays) assigned, two of you
will also be responsible for coming to class with some questions or comments
which will help us focus our discussion. You can note some argument or point in
the essay with which you agree and comment on your agreement; you can note
particularly helpful passages or ideas. I will assign specific essays to individual
class members after our initial class meeting.

Response papers. You will write a response paper focused on the narrative we
are reading. The responses should be a record of your reaction to the day’s
reading; you may want to focus on a character, an idea, a comparison to another
work, on connections to critical readings, on language aspects of the narrative,
etc. You should produce your best writing in the tight time framework you will be
working under. The responses will be graded.

Group report. In your in-class group report, you will need to refer to several
primary and critical works from different segments of the course (you are not
required to address all works). You will want to make some original observations
about what your group can conclude. You will to class a 15-minute oral report
and a 1-2 page written summary of your findings (the summary will be
distributed to other members of the class).

Grading:
Quizzes and Responses – 10%
Response paper – 10%
Group report – 5%
Individual project – 25%
Final test – 50%
REQUIRED TEXTS
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne "The May-Pole of Merry Mount", “The Birth-Mark".
2. Edgar Allan Poe. “The Fall of the House of Usher”.
3. Willa Cather. “Paul’s Case”. Kate Chopin. “The Story of an Hour”.
4. Modernist poetry (William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert
Frost, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer).
5. Henry James. “The Real Thing”.
6. Eugene O’Neill. “Before Breakfast”.
7. Leslie Marmon Silko “Lullaby”.
8. J. M. Coetzee “The Dog”. Chinua Achebe. “Dead Men’s Path”
9. Margaret Atwood. “Happy Endings”.
10. Julian Barnes. “Flaubert's Parrot”.
 LECTURE 1

(4 hours)

THE FIRST AMERICANS: AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE AND

DURING THE COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS

1. Native American oral traditions

Categories of oral literature:
 Narratives
 Creation stories 
 Tribal cultural hero stories
 Autobiographical stories
 Ritual drama
 Songs
 Oratory
Markers of oral tradition:
 a performance
 the sense of community 
 a love of language and playing with language

2. Puritan narratives
Important New England Settlements
William Bradford. History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647.
John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity"
Basic Puritan Beliefs
 Total Depravity
 Unconditional Election
 Limited Atonement
 Irresistible Grace
 Perseverance of the "saints"
The Function of Puritan Writers
 To transform a mysterious God
 To make him more relevant to the universe
 To glorify God
The Style of Puritan Writing
 Protestant
 Purposiveness
 Puritan writing reflected the character and scope of the reading public
Puritan genres:
 Sermons
 Historical narrative
 Poetry
3. “The Plain Style”
The Characteristics of Plain Style:
 simple sentences
 everyday used language
 no figures of speech and no imagery
 shorts words
 direct statements
 references to direct objects

4. Colonial poetry
Anne Bradstreet 
John Bunyan
Edward Taylor 
Phillis Wheatly

LECTURE 2
(4 hours)

THE MAKING OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: 1800 – 1865

1. The Transcendentalists (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau).

Representatives: Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott,

Frederic Henry Hedge, and Theodore Parker
Sources:
English and German Romanticism
 The Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher
The skepticism of Hume
High Tide: The Dial, Fuller, Thoreau
Basic Premises:
An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual can be
found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself. It is not a
rejection of the existence of God, but a preference to explain an individual and
the world in terms of an individual.
The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual
self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge. This is similar to
Aristotle's dictum "know thyself."
Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a living
mystery, full of signs - nature is symbolic.
The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization - this
depends upon the reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies:
a. the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to embrace the whole
world - to know and become one with the world.
b. the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to withdraw, remain
unique and separate - an egotistical existence.

2. Narrative transformations of Romanticism. (N. Hawthorne).

Romance
The romance, while it must adhere to the truth of the human heart, offers a greater
freedom of presentation: the writer may manage the "atmospherical medium" so
as to "bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the
picture."
Dark Romanticism
The genre of "Dark Romanticism" is thought to have emerged from the
Transcendental Movement in 19th century America. Whereas Transcendentalists
felt perfection and their own divinity as innate qualities of mankind (they thiought
utopian communes would work), Dark Romantics believed humans gravitate to
evil and self-destruction (striving for a utopian society is a waste of time). Stories
in this genre share many characteristics of Realism (tell it like it is, what can go
wrong, will). Dark Romantics focus on human fallibility, self-destruction,
judgement, punishment, as well as the psychological effects of guilt and sin.
Authors who embrace this genre include Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. There's an even darker side of the Dark
Romantics: Gothic Literature, which involves sheer terror, personal torment,
graphic morbidity, and the supernatural.

3. Epic novel. H. Melville

4. E. Poe’s gothic fiction.

Gothic Literature
The genre of "Gothic Literature" emerged as the darkest form of Dark
Romanticism in its extreme expressions of self-destruction and sin involving
sheer terror, personal torment, graphic morbidity, madness, and the supernatural.
Put simply, they are stories that scare the bejesus out of you! Edgar Allan Poe
wrote some of the finest macabre tales in this genre. Other prominent authors of
the genre include Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, H.P.
Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, Amelia B.
Edwards, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Elizabeth Gaskell, W.W. Jacobs, W.F.
Harvey, and Robert W. Chambers.
The etymology of the word "Gothic" is from the French gothique and in Latin,
Gothi, which means "not classical." A reference to the ancient Germanic people's
language, it became a medieval style of art and architecture that emerged in
Northern Europe in the 1640s, and by the 19th century became a literary style that
used medieval settings to suggest mystery and horror. Romantic and Victorian
authors who embraced this genre included Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram
Stoker's Dracula, and with a particular focus on psychological terror, the entire
canon of Edgar Allan Poe. The word "gothic" has had a resurgence of popularity
with selective young people: "goth" has come to represent a culture of dark
music, dress, and attitude intent to be shocking or disturbing to others.

5. Voices of African American identity (Frederick Douglass).

Early African American Writings
African Folklore and Myth in Frederic Douglass’ writings.
6. Abolitionism and Feminism.
Historical context.
The main abolitionists.

LECTURE 3

(2 hours)

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM 1865 – 1900

1. Psychological realism and stream-of-consciousness (Henry James).

2. The Development of Literary Regionalism.
a. The Literary Regionalism in New England.
b. The Literary Regionalism in the South.
3. Towards Naturalism. (Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser).
4. The Development of Black Writing (Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence
Dunbar, Booker T. Washington).

LECTURE 4
 (2 hours)

MAKING IT NEW: THE EMERGENCE AND FLOURISHING OF ANGLO-

AMERICAN MODERNISM. 1900 – 1945.

1. Changing national identities.

2. The Inventions of Modernism.
3. Early Moderns. The search for form.
4. Imagism, Vorticism and Objectivism.
5. Modernist Native Tradition.
6. American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.
7. Mass Culture (Detective and Western).
8. The War Novel (John Dos Passos, E. Hemingway).
9. The Lost Generation.
10. The Southern Renaissance.

LECTURE 5
(2 hours)
AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1945
1. From Formalism to freedom in poetry.
2. Confessional poetry.
3. The Black Mountain writers.
4. The beat generation.
5. Defining a new Black aesthetics.
6. Re(mapping) a nation: Chicano/a and Latino/a writing.
7. Improvising America: Asian American writing.
8. The return of the Native American.
9. American drama.
 SCHEDULE OF SEMINARS

SEMINAR 1

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Dark Romanticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
2. Historical Background: Merry Mount ("The May-Pole of Merry Mount").
3. Discuss the conflict between the Puritan law and the laws of nature.
4. The Merry Mount residents and Indians.
5. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s symbolism (“The Birth-Mark").
6. Gothic elements in the short stories of E.A.Poe:
7. The genre of arabesque – tales of terror (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the Usher
Family): semantic and structural specificity.
8. Narrative technique as a core gothic element (first-person narrator, traditional
elements of the story telling)
9. Body and the embodiment of the death: its functions and linguistic means of
creating the gothic image and atmosphere.
10. Tales of ratiocination as a trace to a modern detective story.
11. Condensed style in poetry. Rhythm and music as the instruments of gothics. (The
Raven).

TEXT FOR READING:

Nathaniel Hawthorne. The May-Pole of Merry Mount.
online:http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13707.
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Birth-Mark. online:http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13707.
Harold Bloom. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Updated Edition. Infobase Publishing, 2009. – 260 p.

SEMINAR 2
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Realism in Literature: Historical and Cultural Contexts.
2. The Realistic Novel and its Formation.
3. Evolution of the Realistic Victorian Novel.
4. Neo-Victorianism and The New Realistic Novel
5. Henry James. The Real Thing.

TEXTS FOR READING:

Henry James. The Real Thing.
 SEMINAR 3

1. Local Color Literary Realism. Willa Cather and Kate Chopin.

2. Opposition between culture and nature in local color literature.

3.

TEXT FOR READING:

Taylor, Helen “‘The Perfume of the Past’: Kate Chopin and Post-Colonial New Orleans.” The
Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2008. – P. 147-
160.
Richard H. Brodhead. Regionalism and the Upper Class// Rethinking Class: Literary Studies
and Cultural Formations. - New York: Columbia U.P., 1994. – P. 150 – 173.

SEMINAR 4

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Understanding the context of Modernist poetry

2. Key characteristics of literary modernism.
3. Wallace Stevens’ aesthetic thought.
4. The Harlem Renaissance poetry.

TEXTS FOR READING:

Pound Ezra. Imagisme. Online:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69409
William Logan. The Mystery of Marianne Moore// The New Criterion. Vol. 34, No. 10 / June
2016.
William Carlos Williams. Kora in Hell: Improvisations. By the road to the contagious hospital.
Wallace Stevens. "Floral Decorations for Bananas". “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird”. online: http://101bananas.com/poems/stevens.html.
Toomer Jean. Portrait in Georgia.
Hughes Langston. Jazzonia.
Claude McKay. The Harlem Dancer.

SEMINAR 5 4
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.

TEXT FOR READING:

Oscar Wilde. A Woman of No Importance.

Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance opened in London on April 19, 1893 and proceeded
to run for 113 performances. Successful revivals were mounted on his home turf on both 1907
and 1915. Broadway was first delighted by Wilde’s adeptly witty and unexpectedly trenchant
analysis of the “double standard” in 1893 with a revival not taking place there until 1916.
Wilde’s notorious wit and preference for the epigrammatic style of humor—Lord Illingworth is
the character who voices one of his most famously quotable quotes when he observes that he
observe that “nothing succeeds like excess”—had a habit of confounding theater reviewers at
the time to the point where they underestimated his strength and power as a writer yet again. In
deeming A Woman of No Importance to be a Wilde effort of lesser importance, many
reviewers unintentionally helped Wilde make his point.
Later re-examination of the apparently shallow depths of the comedy has revealed that in its
penetrating examination of the conventional wisdom that one code of morality exists for men
and quite another for women there run a much deeper and corrosively social satire: that those at
the top of society which are assumed to represent the apex of social graces are almost
uniformly more often mere exhibitors of pretentious displays of practice mannerisms devoid of
any actual ethical dimension.
For the distinctly roughish Irishman like Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance is really
about the lofty idealism and empty realities of the British class system. That he so successfully
couched this attack as a merely witty comedy about the double standard applying only to
women may say more about the targets of his attack than the play itself!

SEMINAR 6
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Postcolonial Literature.
2. J. M. Coetzee “The Dog”.
3. Chinua Achebe. “Dead Men’s Path”.

TEXT FOR READING:

J. M. Coetzee “The Dog”. Chinua Achebe. “Dead Men’s Path”.

Criticism.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice
in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd edition.
Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture
E. K. Brathwaite. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in
Anglophone Caribbean Poetry
Rey Chow. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of lntervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies
Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair. Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and
Criticism
Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks
---.The Wretched of the Earth
Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed. "Race," Writing and Difference
Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic.
Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the
Postcolonial Mind.
McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat, eds. Dangerous Liaisons: Gen_der, Nation,
and Postcolonial Perspectives.
John McLeod. Beginning Postcolonialism.

SEMINAR 7

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Native American oral tradition.

2. Native Designs in Leslie Marmon Silko “Lullaby”.
3. The transformative power of storytelling.
4. Richard Rodriguez. “On Becoming a Chicano”.

TEXTS FOR READING:

Leslie Marmon Silko “Lullaby”.
Richard Rodriguez. “On Becoming a Chicano”.

Blicksilver, Edith. "Traditionalism vs. Modernity: Leslie Silko on American Indian Women."
Southwest Review 64.2 (Spring 1979): 149-60.
Jahner, Elaine M. "Leslie Marmon Silko." Dictionary of Native American Literature. Ed.
Andrew Wiget. New York: Garland, 1994. 499-511.

SEMINAR 8

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. The postmodern historical novel.
2. Historiographic metafiction.
3. Historical metaphors in postmodern writings.
 4. Julian Barnes Flaubert's Parrot.

TEXTS FOR READING:

Julian Barnes Flaubert's Parrot.

The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era: Presenting the Past
(Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)
 STUDY QUESTIONSso

1. Early American Literature. Native American Oral Tradition.

2. Common Themes in Early Puritan Writing.
3. The Style of Puritan Writing.
4. Early American Literature 1700-1800.
5. Characteristics of the 18th Century.
6. America’s first black writers.
7. Gothicism. E. A. Poe.
8. Transcendentalism. Reasons for the Rise of American Transcendentalism.
9. Basic Tenets of American Transcendentalism.
10.Identify the characteristics of Gothic Literature and examples of work which
fit the genre. Identify the different types of "scary" that qualify.
11. How does "Gothic Literature" differ from "Dark Romanticism"?
12.The Local Color Movement (1865-1880).
13.Subject Matter & Characterization in Naturalistic Fiction.
14.American Literature 1865 – 1914. Moving West. Modernization.
15.Poetry of Emily Dickinson.
16.Poetry of Walt Whitman.
17. Henry James.
18.Innovations of Modernist poetry.
19.Eliot T. S.
20.The Harlem Renaissance.
21.Langston Hughes. Poetry.
22.Zora Neale Hurston.
23.E.O’Neill and his plays in the context of modernism.
24.Define the characteristic features of O’Neill’s plays.
25.Postmodernism in the 1970 – 1980.
26. Historiographic metafiction.
27. Multiculturalism.

Writing Assignments
1. Consider secular consequences of Puritan theology: the Puritans' attitudes toward
Native Americans, ordinary life, witches, house servants, slavery, and infant damnation.
Choose two of these topics and explore their treatment in literary works from the
period.
2. "The essential difference between the writers of Puritan New England and those of the
American Enlightenment is that the former believed that man was irrational and
basically corrupt and the latter believed man rational and basically good." Discuss.
3. Examine modernist poets' use of traditional metric forms. Analyze what Frost does to
and with iambic pentameter in Desert Places or how Stevens uses it in The Idea of
Order at Key West.
 4. Choose any three twentieth-century works and show how they respond to the following
quotation from Wallace Stevens's Of Modern Poetry: The poem of the mind in the act
of finding / What will suffice. It has not always had/To find: the scene was set; it
repeated what/Was in the script.

RESOURCES

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Austin, Eliot, and Lawrence Eliot. Ghosts of the Gothic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Axelrod, Steven G., and others. eds. The New Anthology of American Poetry, I: Traditions and
Revolutions, Beginnings to 1900. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003.

Bennett, Paula B. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's
Poetry, 1800-1900. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

Benstock, Shari, Suzanne Ferriss, and Susanne Woods. A Handbook of Literary Feminisms.
NY: Oxford UP, 2002.

Bradbury Malcolm, Ruland Richard. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of

American Literature. – Penguin Books, 1991.

Brill de Ramírez, Susan B. Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition.
Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999.

Burns, Allan. Thematic Guide to American Poetry. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.

Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. NY:
Routledge, 2004.

Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and
American Literary Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P 2003

Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Second Edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 20

Gross, Louis S. Redefining the American Gothic: from Wieland to Days of the Dead. Ann
Arbor: U. M. I. Research P, 1989.

Haggerty, George F. Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form. University Park: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989.

Katanski, Amelia V. Learning to Write 'Indian': The Boarding-School Experience and

American Indian Literature. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2005.

Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 2004.

Orr, David. Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. NY: HarperCollins, 2011.
Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. WWW URL:
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap1/native.html
Phelan, Joseph. The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Pulitano, Elvira. Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003.

Rambsy, Howard, II. The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American
Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011.

San Juan, E., Jr., and Barbara Harlow. Working through the Contradictions: From Cultural
Theory to Critical Practice. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2004.

Spikes, Michael P. Contemporary American Literary Theory. Columbia: U of South Carolina

P, 2003.

Tanselle, G. Thomas. Textual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950-2000. Charlottesville:

Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2005.

Tyson, Lois. Learning for a Diverse World: Using Critical Theory to Read and Write about
Literature. NY: Routledge, 2001.
 Київський національний лінгвістичний університет
Кафедра теорії та історії світової літератури імені професора В. І. Фесенко

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з курсу «Література країни, мова якої вивчається»

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