FALL 2000 Readings
ABBREVIATED SYLLABUS

Week 1
Emerson, “Self-Reliance” and “The American Scholar” [essays]
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

Week 2: Travel and analysis narratives: excerpts from two 19th-century and three 20th-century classics
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [excerpts]
Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans
Henry Adams, “The Virgin and the Dynamo” from The Education of Henry Adams
Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day
Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues

Week 3:
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, plus one of his story-parables on art, perhaps “The Figure in the Carpet”

Weeks 4-5: F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
The Short Stories of FSF: A New Collection (1995)
The Crack-Up [stories and autobiographical pieces, including journals]
Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, by Jeffrey Meyers (1994)
on reserve: Hemingway on FSF and himself, from A Moveable Feast; French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jackson Bryer; and Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship, by Scott Donaldson; Matthew Bruccoli, Fitzgerald and Heminway: A Dangerous Friendship

Week 6:
Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises and The Garden of Eden
on reserve: Michael Reynolds, Young Hemingway and Hemingway: The Paris Years, plus Anthony Burgess, Ernest Hemingway [biographies]

Week 7:
The Portable Dorothy Parker [poems, stories, drama, etc.]
Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: “What Fresh Hell is This?” [biography]

Week 8: Twentieth Century American Theater classics
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire
also available for viewing: performances on video of all three plays
[we will also have read some Dorothy Parker the week before]

Weeks 9-10:
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man and Shadow and Act [essays]
excerpts from Going to the Territory [essays] and Conversations with Ralph Ellison

Weeks 11-12:
Flannery O’Connor, Complete Stories
on reserve: Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor; and Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose and Conversations with Flannery O’Connor

Week 13:
reading week: each student will choose a topic and give a seminar presentation. This may be discussion of an author or work not on the syllabus; analysis of 1-2 books on U.S. cultural history and theory, etc.