Text Box: American Writers 2 Peter Ramos Tuesdays 7:00 - 9:40 Reg. No. 127319 Text Box: 242 Text Box: National poetry—usually the sign of civilization and refinement—begins in these United States as the country faced a coming civil war. In this moment of impending national crisis, Walt Whitman was writing, “I sound my barbaric Yawp over the roofs of the world.” Eight years later, Emily Dickinson would write “I cannot live with you.” This course begins at the conclusion of that war by examining the latter work of these two writers with whom modern American poetry begins. Some questions we’ll keep in mind as we read their work and the literature that follows are: ‘where is the self in a democracy based on majority rule?’ and, ‘can two selves meet in such a democracy and keep, each of them, their individuality and autonomy?’ We will also consider such questions of union and separation in terms of freedom, identity, race, gender, ethnicity and class. After moving on to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, we’ll enter the twentieth century by way of the American literature surrounding the Industrial Revolution and World War I. As these events wrought radical changes in Europe and America, so American literature was changing in order to give a form and articulation to such a new world. We’ll examine these changes in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and the modern American poetry—by Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stein, Moore, et al—being written at home and abroad. We’ll then move on to the Harlem Renaissance, to Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, to selections from Jean Toomer’s Cane and the poetry of Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen and others. We’ll read some short stories from William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, published a year before America entered World War II, and some from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, published a decade after that war. We’ll reconsider the ‘American Dream’ and the prosperity of 1950’s as we read Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, as well as works from the Beats and the Confessional poets: Ginsber’s Howl & Other Poems, selections from the poetry of Creeley, Kerouac, O’Hara, Lowell, Plath and others. Finally, we’ll approach the end of the twentieth century by remembering to forget the previous one in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. If there’s enough time, we’ll get to Don Delillo’s postmodern White Noise, and Denis Johnson’s fractured Jesus’ Son. Class Requirements: regular attendance (since we only meet once a week, each class is a week’s worth of class time), two class presentations, two 5 - 7 page essays, quizzes and a midterm exam. Course description not available at this time.