Text Box: American Classics and Culture Professor Robert Daly Tuesday 3:30 - 6:10 Reg. No. 012888 Text Box: 495 Text Box: 4) A study of two films: Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love, as attempts at making Shakespeare accessible to contemporary audiences. 5) A case study of structuralism/ semiotics, with a particular focus on excerpts from Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (The Writing Lesson) and Roland Barthes, Mythologies. The point of case study # 5 would be to see how such theoretical texts have applications in high school classes and in such assignments as watching specific television programs and reading specific magazine advertisements. Recent issues of Jane magazine, for example provide rich resource material. 6) Throughout, we will use Robert Atwan’s Convergences, a very handsome, indeed slick, first year writing textbook as a compass and guide for critical understanding of present theory and practice. Requirements: a seminar presentation and an end of term paper. Frequent impromptus on the readings. Some interviews student-to-student on habits of reading and cultural interests. I will encourage students to design their own research agendas. Most readings will be on reserve or on-line at Blackboard. To be purchased: Robert Atwan’s, Convergences, and Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Books will be available at Talking Leaves. Text Box: Unlike most of our other courses, this one will not be limited by period or genre. We shall explore American classics, in their cultural contexts, from the Puritans to the Postmoderns and beyond. We shall attend to the family resemblances of an American tradition in literature. This tradition of recycling and revision includes and connects Mary Rowlandson, Susanna Haswell Rowson, Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Zitkala-Sa, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and Susan Power. We shall consider what these texts meant in the conversations of their own times and what they may yet mean in ours. Like Vergil, we shall try to bring the Muses home. Texts: Andrews, William L., ed. Classic American Autobiographies. (Mentor, Penguin), contains Rowlandson, Franklin, Douglass, and Zitkala-Sa. Rowson, Susanna Haswell. Charlotte Temple. Ed. Cathy Davidson (Oxford). Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Signet). Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. (Rutgers UP). Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 3rd ed. (Norton Critical Edition). James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. (Signet). Wharton, Edith. Summer. (Signet). Cather, Willa. My Antonia. (Houghton Mifflin). Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. (Scribner’s). Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. (New American Library). Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. (Ivy Books). Power, Susan. The Grass Dancer. Berkeley Books, N.Y.