Post Civil-War Literature (1865-1914)

Week 1: Ice-Breaker and Important 19th Century Forerunners

Ice Breakers and Red Tape

Read Syllabus, Master Reading Schedule, Assignment Rubrics, and Introduce Textbook(s)
Sign up for weekly student presentations
Introduction Exercise
Daybooks and WID

Important 19th Century Forerunners

HAAL

American Literature 1865-1914

3-29

Walt Whitman Song of Myself Sections 1-26

20

Emily Dickenson

79

I taste a liquor never brewed

84

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

87

I heard a Fly buzz-when I died

92

Because I could not stop for Death

91

The Rise of Realism (1865-1890s)

William Dean Howells from The Editors Study

305

Local Color
Mark Twain The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County98, 101
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

A New England Nun

Charles Chesnutt The Goophered Grapevine

437
457

Week 2:

The Rise of Realism (1865-1890s)

Objective or Dramatic Realism

William Dean Howells

Editha

305

Ambrose Bierce

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

317

The Yellow Wall-Paper

484

Psychological Realism
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Developments in African-American Writing / Naturalism and Writing of Social Concern

(1890s-1910s)
Developments in African-American Writing
HAAL

Circumstances and Achievements of African Americans

Paul Lawrence Dunbar

An Ante-Bellum Sermon

Link

We Wear the Mask

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Sister Josepha

Link

Booker T. Washington

The Atlanta Exposition Address

447

W.E.B. DuBois

from The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter III

531

Week 3: Developments in African-American Writing / Naturalism and Writing of Social

Concern (1890s-1910s)
Naturalism and Writing of Social Concerns (1890s-1910s)
Stephen Crane

The Open Boat

581

Jack London

To Build a Fire

627

Frank Norris

A Deal in Wheat

Link

Post World War I Literature (1918-1945)

The Modern Period (1910s-1940s)
HAAL

The Centers of the Modern

Modernism and the Self
Modernism, Popular Culture & Media

Imagism
Ezra Pound

In a Station of the Metro

786

Carl Sandburg

Fog

763

Happiness

Link

Amy Lowell

Summer Rain

709

William Carlos Williams

The Red Wheelbarrow

777

[Buffalo Bills defunct]

951

High Modernism
e.e. cummings

[my sweet old etcetera]

T.S. Eliot

[l(a]

Link

The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock

819

Week 4: The Modern Period (1910s-1940s)

Low Modernism
Ernest Hemingway

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

1019

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Babylon Revisited

963

Susan Glaspell

Trifles

742

Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken

727

Stopping by Woods

The Harlem Renaissance (New Negro Renaissance) (1920s) / The Southern Renaissance
(1920s-1950s)
The Harlem Renaissance
HAAL

Modernism and The New Negro

Jean Toomer

Fern

Langston Hughes

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

958
1037

The Weary Blues

Harlem
Zora Neale Hurston

The Gllded Six-Bits

939

Countee Cullen

Yet Do I Marvel

1056

Incident

Week 5: The Harlem Renaissance (New Negro Renaissance) (1920s) / The Southern
Renaissance (1920s-1950s)
The Southern Renaissance
Modernism and the South

William Faulkner

A Rose for Emily

994

Eudora Welty

Petrified Man

1092

Flannery OConnor

Good Country People

1339

Post World War II Literature (1945-present)

Week 6 : Mid-Century Poetry and Prose (1950s-1960s)

HAAL

Contemporary Period: 1945 to the Present

The Beats
Allen Ginsberg

A Supermarket in California

1354

Jack Kerouac

From Big Sur

1313

Robert Lowell

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

1298

Anne Sexton

Starry Night

1371

Confessional Poetry

Sylvias Death

Sylvia Plath

Lady Lazarus

1416

Daddy

Mid-Century Poetry and Prose (1950s-1960s)

Mid-Century Minority Writers (1940s-1960s)
James Baldwin

Going to Meet the Man

1327

Ralph Ellison

A Party Down at the Square

1209

Gwendolyn Brooks

We Real Cool

1209

To the Diaspora
Martin Luther King, Jr.

I Have a Dream

1393

Week 7: Late Century Minority Writers (1970s-Present) / Contemporary Fiction

(Minimalism/others)
Late-Century Minority Writers (1970s-present)
Alice Walker
Everyday Use

1530

Toni Morrison

Recitatif

1401

Louise Erdrich

Fleur

1595

Late Century Minority Writers (1970s-Present) / Contemporary Fiction (Minimalism/others)

Contemporary Fiction
Minimalism
Raymond Carver

Cathedral

1494

Week 8 Final Exam