DOCSLIB.ORG

Professor: Marshall Boswell Office: Palmer 316 Office Phone/Voice Mail: 843-3581 Office Hours: Tuth 1:00-2:30 E-Mail: [email protected] and by Appointment

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Professor: Marshall Boswell Office: Palmer 316 Office Phone/Voice Mail: 843-3581 Office Hours: Tuth 1:00-2:30 E-Mail: Boswell@Rhodes.Edu and by Appointment Professor: Marshall Boswell Office: Palmer 316 Office Phone/Voice Mail: 843-3581 Office Hours: TuTh 1:00-2:30 E-Mail: [email protected] and by appointment English 285: Texts and contexts TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM, Clough 100 Required Texts Backpack Literature, ed. X.J. Kenndy, Dana Gioi The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Cuddon, J.A. The A merican, Henry James A merican Pastoral, Philip Roth ----------------------------------------------SHORT FICTION-------------------------------------------- Jan 12: Introduction to class; "A&P," John Updike, p. 1 8 Week 1: Point of View 17: "Araby," James Joyce, p. 315 "Greasy Lake," T. Coraghessan Boyle, p. 293 19: Kennedy, Chapter 2: Point of View, pp. 28 -52 Week 2: Symbolism 24: "Cathedral," Raymond Carver, p. 77 "The Things They Carried," Tim O’Brien, p. 90 26: " Everyday Use," Alice Walker, p. 69 “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, p. 237 Week 3: Character 31: “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Katherine Anne Porter, p. 56 “Mrs. Brill,” Katherine Anne Porter, p. 64 Feb 2 : "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Joyce Carol Oates, p. 323 “A Worn Path,” Eudora Welty, p. 365 Week 4: Theme 7 : "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway, p. 1 42 “The Open Boat,” Stephen Crane, p. 19 5 9 : “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” Flannery O'Connor, p. 3 52 “Brownies,” ZZ Packer, p. 177 -------------------------------------------------POETRY-------------------------------------------------- Week 5: Voice 1 3 : SHORT STORY PAPER DUE (4-5 Pages) 14: Kennedy, "Reading a Poem," pp. 377-391; "Listening to a Voice," 393- 417 16: Kennedy: W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939” and “Musee des Beax Arts,” pp. 585 -588; T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” p. 600; Sylvia Plath, "Daddy,” p. 630; William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” p. 650 Week 6: Attention To Details 21: Kennedy, "Words," pp. 418 -436; "Saying and Suggesting," pp. 437 -447; Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” 638. 23: Kennedy, "Imagery," pp. 448-461; Figures of Speech, pp. 462 -477; “William Blake, “The Tiger”, p. 590; John Donne, “The Flea.” P. 601 ; “Alan Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” p. 611; John Updike, “Ex- Basketball Player,” p. 642. Week 7: Poetic Forms and Conventions 28: Kennedy, "Rhythm," pp. 497-511; “Sound,” pp. 481 -496. March 1 : Kennedy, "Closed Forms," pp. 512-529; "Open Form," pp. 533-545; Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art,” 589 ; William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All,” Week 8: Signs and Symbols 5: POETRY PAPER DUE (4-5 pages) 6 : Kennedy, “Symbol,” 548-560; Kennedy, Myth and Narrative,” pp. 561 - 575; Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” p. 596; Shelley, “Ozymandias,” p. 638; Tennyson, “Ulysses” 6 39 8 : MIDTERM EXAM 13-15 SPRING BREAK -------------------------------------------------DRAMA-------------------------------------------------- Week 9 20: August Wilson, Fences, Act I, pp. 1022-1055 22: August Wilson, Fences, Act II, pp. 1054 -1079 -----------------------------------------THE NOVEL--------------------------------------- Week 1 0 27 Henry James, The A merican, pp. 1 -90 29 Henry James, the A merican, pp. 91-186 Week 1 1 April 2: THIRD PAPER DUE (Short Story, Poetry or Drama: 3-4 Pages) 3 : Henry James, The A merican, pp. 187 -279 5 : EASTER BREAK Week 1 2 10: Henry James, The A merican, pp. 280 -end 12: Philip Roth, A merican Pastoral, pp. 3 -83 Week 1 3 1 7 : Philip Roth, A merican Pastoral, pp. 83 -174 19: Philip Roth, A merican Pastoral, pp. 175 -281 24 Philip Roth, A merican Pastoral, pp. 285 -336 26: Philip Roth, A merican Pastoral, pp. 337 -end FINAL PAPER DUE (TBA) POLICIES FOR ENG 285: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course functions as a hands-on practicum in reading, analyzing, and developing critical arguments about literary texts in their critical and cultural contexts. It is designed to equip prospective majors and minors with the skills necessary for middle- and upper-division English courses. We will read and interpret a wide range of works, including short stories, novels, poems, and plays, focusing throughout on the concrete particulars of genre as well as on the pertinent cultural forces bearing on the texts in question. We will begin by reading a number of short stories by authors ranging from James Joyce, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and others, then move on to poetry before shifting to an exploration of drama. The course will conclude with a close reading of two novels—The American by Henry James and American Pastoral by Philip Roth—that chart the stylistic transformation from realism to postmodernism. Via The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, we will also develop a shared critical vocabulary to be used in a series of analytical papers touching upon all four genres.. ASSIGNMENTS: You will write three short papers and one longer research paper. Each paper will conduct a close reading of some aspect of one of the assigned works, whether a short story, a poem or poems, a play, or a novel. The first two papers will be 4-5 pages in length and should represent your own interpretation of an assigned story or set of poems, respectively. The third paper will be 3-4 pages in length and can focus on any text you haven’t addressed already. The final paper, which should clock in at roughly 6-8 pages, must employ at least two pieces of secondary critical material from refereed journals or respected publishing houses. There will also be a MIDTERM EXAM covering lilterary and rhetorical terms and devices that we have explored throughout the first half of the semester. QUIZZES: I will give a number of pop quizzes throughout the semester. These will consist of 3 questions aimed at determining whether or not you have done the reading. A passing grade on a quiz will not affect your grade, whereas a failing grade will be counted as an absence. Hence you will never need to “make up” a quiz. GRADING: All writing assignments are subject to the honor code. This means that, at the end of each assignment, you will write out the honor pledge in full and sign it. All work will be evaluated on the basis of the grading scale outlined on page 71 of the current Rhodes College Catalogue. Your final grade for the course will be computed as follows: Paper 1 20% Paper 2 20% Paper 3 15% Paper 4 30% Midterm 15% ATTENDANCE: You may miss two classes totally free of charge. I make no distinction between “excused” or “unexcused” absences. As such, you should reserve these two absences in case of illness or sports-team travel. An F on a pop quiz will count as an absence, as will failure to bring your book to class. Absences after those initial two will be deemed unexcused except for serious, extenuating circumstances (prolonged, unexpected illness, etc). Any unexcused absences after those initial three will cost your final course average two tenths of a point. If you miss more than six classes, you might fail the course. LATE PAPERS: All papers are due on the day stipulated on the syllabus. Any unexcused late assignment will be penalized a tier reduction per day late; in other words, an A becomes an A-, a B+ becomes a B, and so on. PROBLEMS? Take care of them in advance. I am more than happy to work with you if you give me enough lead time. For instance, if you need an extension on a paper, you must request one at least a week before the paper’s due date. Do not email me with questions that you could just as reasonably ask me in person the next class period. I will try to respond immediately to emails sent during the week but won’t answer emails sent over the weekend, unless they are particularly urgent. PAPER REQUIREMENTS: All formal papers in this class are to be typed, double- spaced, and pledged in full. You will use the MLA documentation format, which we'll discuss in class. .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Four Quarters: November 1962 Vol. XII, No. 1
    Four Quarters Volume 12 Number 1 Four Quarters: November 1962 Vol. XII, Article 1 No. 1 11-1962 Four Quarters: November 1962 Vol. XII, No. 1 Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/fourquarters Recommended Citation (1962) "Four Quarters: November 1962 Vol. XII, No. 1," Four Quarters: Vol. 12 : No. 1 , Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/fourquarters/vol12/iss1/1 This Complete Issue is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Four Quarters by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Katherine Anne Porter Number uarters Katherine Anne Porter: Feeling, Form, and Truth • Page 1 An Article by John V. Hagopian "'Maria Conccpcion": Life among the Ruins • Page 11 An Article by James Hafley Foe • Page 17 A Poem by Mother Mary Anthony, S.H.CJ. too Winter Term • Page 18 A Short Story by Claude F. Koch Katherine Anne Porter's "Hacienda" • Page 24 An Article by George Hendrick Illusion and Allusion: Reflections in "The Cracked Looking-Glass" • Page 30 An Article by Brother Joseph Wiesenfarth, F. S.C. Two Poems • Page 38 Walls for the New Student Horizon by Charles B. Tinkham Waldie • Page 40 A Short Story by Alma Roberts Giordan CtJ SHIP OF FOOLS: Notes on Style • Page 46 An Article by Robert 8. Heilman She Stands Alone ® Page 56 A Tribute to Katherine Anne Porter by James F, Powers Collecting Katherine A.
    [Show full text]
  • John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class More Article Man, Dies at 76 Get Urba
    LIKE RABBITS Welcome to TimesPeople TimesPeople Lets You Share and Discover the Bes Get Started HOME PAGE TODAY'S PAPER VIDEO MOST POPULAR TIMES TOPICS Books WORLD U.S. N.Y. / REGION BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE HEALTH SPORTS OPINION ARTS STYL ART & DESIGN BOOKS Sunday Book Review Best Sellers First Chapters DANCE MOVIES MUSIC John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class More Article Man, Dies at 76 Get Urba By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Sig Published: January 28, 2009 wee SIGN IN TO den RECOMMEND John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Cha Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism COMMENTS so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of E-MAIL Ads by Go American authors, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. He was 76 and SEND TO PHONE Emmetsb Commerci lived in Beverly Farms, Mass. PRINT www.Emme REPRINTS U.S. Trus For A New SHARE Us Directly USTrust.Ba Lanco Hi 3BHK, 4BH Living! www.lancoh MOST POPUL E-MAILED 1 of 11 © 2009 John Zimmerman. All rights reserved. 7/9/2009 10:55 PM LIKE RABBITS 1. Month Dignit 2. Well: 3. GLOB 4. IPhon 5. Maure 6. State o One B 7. Gail C 8. A Run Meani 9. Happy 10. Books W. Earl Snyder Natur John Updike in the early 1960s, in a photograph from his publisher for the release of “Pigeon Feathers.” More Go to Comp Photos » Multimedia John Updike Dies at 76 A star ALSO IN BU The dark Who is th ADVERTISEM John Updike: A Life in Letters Related An Appraisal: A Relentless Updike Mapped America’s Mysteries (January 28, 2009) 2 of 11 © 2009 John Zimmerman.
    [Show full text]
  • Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: the Growth of Consciousness
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1979 Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: The Growth of Consciousness. Alexander George Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation George, Alexander, "Philip Roth's Confessional Narrators: The Growth of Consciousness." (1979). Dissertations. 1823. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1823 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1979 Alexander George PHILIP ROTH'S CONFESSIONAL NARRATORS: THE GROWTH OF' CONSCIOUSNESS by Alexander George A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 1979 ACKNOWLEDGE~£NTS It is a singular pleasure to acknowledge the many debts of gratitude incurred in the writing of this dissertation. My warmest thanks go to my Director, Dr. Thomas Gorman, not only for his wise counsel and practical guidance, but espec~ally for his steadfast encouragement. I am also deeply indebted to Dr. Paul Messbarger for his careful reading and helpful criticism of each chapter as it was written. Thanks also must go to Father Gene Phillips, S.J., for the benefit of his time and consideration. I am also deeply grateful for the all-important moral support given me by my family and friends, especially Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Hip to Post45
    DAVID J. A L WORTH Hip to Post45 Michael Szalay, Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. 324 pp. $24.95. here are we now?” About five years [ ] have passed since Amy Hungerford “ W asked this question in her assess- ment of the “revisionary work” that was undertaken by literary historians at the dawn of the twenty- first century.1 Juxtaposing Wendy Steiner’s contribution to The Cambridge History of American Literature (“Postmodern Fictions, 1970–1990”) with new scholarship by Rachel Adams, Mark McGurl, Deborah Nelson, and others, Hungerford aimed to demonstrate that “the period formerly known as contemporary” was being redefined and revitalized in exciting new ways by a growing number of scholars, particularly those associated with Post45 (410). Back then, Post45 named but a small “collective” of literary historians, “mainly just finishing first books or in the middle of second books” (416). Now, however, it designates something bigger and broader, a formidable institution dedi- cated to the study of American culture during the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. This institution comprises an ongoing sequence of academic conferences (including a large 1. Amy Hungerford, “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary,” American Literary History 20.1–2 (2008) 412. Subsequent references will appear in the text. Contemporary Literature 54, 3 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/13/0003-0622 ᭧ 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System ALWORTH ⋅ 623 gathering that took place at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011), a Web-based journal of peer-reviewed scholarship and book reviews (Post45), and a monograph series published by Stanford University Press (Post•45).
    [Show full text]
  • Philip Roth, Henry Roth and the History of the Jews
    CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 16 (2014) Issue 2 Article 9 Philip Roth, Henry Roth and the History of the Jews Timothy Parrish Florida State University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Modern Literature Commons, and the Other Arts and Humanities Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Parrish, Timothy. "Philip Roth, Henry Roth and the History of the Jews." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.2 (2014): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2411> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field.
    [Show full text]
  • Postsecular Sermons in Contemporary American Fiction
    Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English Spring 6-30-2011 The Sermonic Urge: Postsecular Sermons in Contemporary American Fiction Peter W. Rorabaugh Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Rorabaugh, Peter W., "The Sermonic Urge: Postsecular Sermons in Contemporary American Fiction." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2011. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/75 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SERMONIC URGE: POSTSECULAR SERMONS IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION by PETER W. RORABAUGH Under the Direction of Christopher Kocela ABSTRACT Contemporary American novels over the last forty years have developed a unique orientation toward religious and spiritual rhetoric that can best be understood within the multidisciplinary concept of the postsecular. In the morally-tinged discourse of their characters, several esteemed American novelists (John Updike, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy) since 1970 have used sermons or sermon-like artifacts to convey postsecular attitudes and motivations. These postsecular sermons express systems of belief that are hybrid, exploratory, and confessional in nature. Through rhetorical analysis of sermons in four contemporary American novels, this dissertation explores the performance of postsecularity in literature and defines the contribution of those tendancies to the field of literary and rhetorical studies. INDEX WORDS: Postsecular, Postmodern, Christianity, American literature, Sermon, Religious rhetoric, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Kenneth Burke, St.
    [Show full text]
  • Chinese Scholars' Perspective on John Updike's "Rabbit Tetralogy"1
    Linguistics and Literature Studies 8(1): 8-13, 2020 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/lls.2020.080102 Chinese Scholars' Perspective on John Updike's 1 "Rabbit Tetralogy" Zhao Cheng Foreign Languages Studies School, Soochow University, China Received Ocotber 15, 2019; Revised November 25, 2019; Accepted December 4, 2019 Copyright©2020 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract Updike's masterpiece, using skillful realism, most productive, and most awarded writers in the United succeeded in drawing a panoramic picture of the American States in the second half of the twentieth century. "Rabbit society from the 1950s to the early 1990s in the "Rabbit Tetralogy", Updike’s masterpiece, the core of the entire Tetralogy." Updike strives to reflect the changes in literary creation system of Updike, composed of "Rabbit contemporary American social culture for nearly half a Run" (1960), "Rabbit Redux" (1971), "Rabbit is Rich" century from the "rabbit" Harry, the everyman of the (1981), and "Rabbit at Rest" (1991), represents the highest American society and the life experiences of his ordinary achievement of the writer’s novel creation. In famil y. "Rabbit Tetralogy" truly reflects the living contemporary American literature, the publication of conditions of the contradictions of contemporary Rabbit Tetralogy is considered as a landmark event, and Americans: endless pursuit of free life or independent self Updike’s character "Rabbit" Harry, one of the "most and the embarrassment and helplessness of it; the confusing literary figures in traditional American customary life and hedonism under the traditional values, literature", has become a classic figure in contemporary the intense collision of self-indulgent lifestyles inspired by American literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Katherine Anne Porter, Her Library, and Her Work
    The University of Maryland Campus Club cordially invites you to Katherine Anne Porter, Her Library, and Her Work KAP ca 1919 Sunday, April 26, 2015 2:30-4:30pm Hornbake Library, University of Maryland Presented by Beth Alvarez, Ph.D., the University of Maryland Libraries’ Curator of Literary Manuscripts Emerita Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her Collected Stories (1965) and previously published three well-regarded collections of short fiction (1935, 1939, 1944) and the best-selling novel, Ship of Fools (1962). Her papers and personal library are among the holdings of Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland, also the location of the Katherine Anne Porter Room, established in appreciation of her generosity and interest in 1968. The Porter Room houses furniture, memorabilia, and a large portion of her personal library. On Sunday, April 26, at 2:30 pm in the Katherine Anne Porter Room, Beth Alvarez, Ph.D. will give a brief presentation about Porter, the history of the Porter Room, and the contents of the room. After the presentation in the Porter Room, attendees will adjourn to Room 0302H on the library's ground floor for light refreshments and an informal question and answer period. The program will conclude with the screening of the 1986 American Masters documentary "Katherine Anne Porter: The Eye of Memory." The roughly one- hour program features interviews with Porter's writer friends Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and Eleanor Clark, her nephew Paul Porter; and Porter biographer Joan Givner.
    [Show full text]
  • Addition to Summer Letter
    May 2020 Dear Student, You are enrolled in Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition for the coming school year. Bowling Green High School has offered this course since 1983. I thought that I would tell you a little bit about the course and what will be expected of you. Please share this letter with your parents or guardians. A.P. Literature and Composition is a year-long class that is taught on a college freshman level. This means that we will read college level texts—often from college anthologies—and we will deal with other materials generally taught in college. You should be advised that some of these texts are sophisticated and contain mature themes and/or advanced levels of difficulty. In this class we will concentrate on refining reading, writing, and critical analysis skills, as well as personal reactions to literature. A.P. Literature is not a survey course or a history of literature course so instead of studying English and world literature chronologically, we will be studying a mix of classic and contemporary pieces of fiction from all eras and from diverse cultures. This gives us an opportunity to develop more than a superficial understanding of literary works and their ideas. Writing is at the heart of this A.P. course, so you will write often in journals, in both personal and researched essays, and in creative responses. You will need to revise your writing. I have found that even good students—like you—need to refine, mature, and improve their writing skills. You will have to work diligently at revising major essays.
    [Show full text]
  • NOTES on CONTRIBUTORS Thomas La Borie Burns Teaches English
    NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Thomas La Borie Burns teaches English and American literature at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. He has published poetry, poetic translations, and essays on literature and other topics, both in Brazil and in the United States, and is currently a doctoral candidate in literature at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Willian Harmon has taught English and American literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapei Hill since 1970. He has published five volumes of poetry, including winners of the Lamont Award and the William Carlos Williams Award. He has published a criticai study of Ezra Pound s work and has edited The Oxford Book of American Light Verse, the fifth and sixth editions of the Macmillan Handbook to Literature, and Columbia University Press anthologies of the top 100 and top 500 poems in English. Robert F. Kiernan is Professor of English and World literature at Manhattan College, in New York City. He was a Fulbright Professor at the Universidade de São Paulo in 1991 and the Universidade Federal de Brasília in 1992. He Lectured at the ABRA PUI conference in Maringá in 1989. He is the author of six books: Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers (1986); Gore Vidal (1982); American Writing Since 1945: A Criticai Survey (1983, translated as A Literatura Americana Pós 1945: Um Ensaio Crítico, 1988); Noel Coward (1986), Saul Bellow (1989), and Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel (1990). Barbara Ladd is Assistant Professor of American literature in the English Department at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. She has published in The Southern Quarterly, The Mississippi Quarterly, and elsewhere.
    [Show full text]
  • An Ecocritical Approach to the Southern Novels Of
    AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO THE SOUTHERN NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY by PAUL SANDERS QUICK (Under the Direction of Hugh Ruppersburg) ABSTRACT Using the three streams of radical environmental philosophy—deep ecology, ecofeminism, and social ecology—this study highlights the subtle and complex environmental ethic in Cormac McCarthy’s southern novels. It also reassesses the critical consensus that these works are expressions of existentialist or nihilistic philosophy. By delineating the different relationships that McCarthy’s heroes and anti- heroes have with nonhuman nature, an ecocritical analysis views their alienation as the effect of their separation from nonhuman nature. At the root of this alienation is an anthropocentric and mechanistic mode of thinking that is dominant in Western philosophy and that this study defines as Cartesian. While McCarthy’s environmentalist heroes are persecuted by Cartesian institutions and displaced from the land on which they have defined themselves and made meaning, his Cartesian anti-heroes represent extreme manifestations of Cartesian thinking. McCarthy’s environmentalism is as much a critique and indictment of Cartesian thinking as it is a portrayal of the value of a life lived in close contact with nonhuman nature. INDEX WORDS: Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, ecocriticism, deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology, Cartesian thinking, environmental literature AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH TO THE SOUTHERN NOVELS OF CORMAC MCCARTHY by PAUL SANDERS QUICK B.A., Duke University,
    [Show full text]
  • Catherine Morley
    49th Parallel, Vol. 23 (Summer 2009) Hobbs ISSN: 1753-5794 (online) Catherine Morley. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. New York: Routledge, 2009. 226pp. Alex Hobbs* Anglia Ruskin University In this slim volume (part of the excellent Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature series, edited by Susan Castillo), Catherine Morley tackles three of the most critically acclaimed and most widely discussed American authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Morley concentrates on John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom series, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral trilogy and Don DeLillo’s Underworld, all of which have been praised as contenders for the title of the “Great American Novel.” While these writers have been previously compared in other ways, Morley brings them together in a genre study; she considers the influence of the epic on their work, and their place in the epic tradition. In line with the overarching theme of the series, Morley suggests that these authors are not necessarily, or perhaps not even, the quintessentially American writers that they have been purported to be. Rather, she shows that their influences are equally European, and that their message concerning America is not a unifying one. In short, Morley argues that these are authors writing from a transnational heritage and to a fragmented America. Taking issue with the term “Great American Novel,” she suggests that these novels be considered in the tradition of the prose epic or epic novel, and isolates James Joyce, and in particular his novel Ulysses, as a unifying influence for all three authors.
    [Show full text]