ENGL 291: The American Novel Since 1945 (Spring, 2008) Syllabus Professor: Amy Hungerford, Professor of English, Yale University Description: In "The American Novel Since 1945" students will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces the formal and thematic developments of the novel in this period, focusing on the relationship between writers and readers, the conditions of publishing, innovations in the novel's form, fiction's engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course concludes with a contemporary novel chosen by the students in the class. Texts: Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger) (Harper Perennial Restored edition, 1993) 1945 Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 1949 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Vintage) 1955 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Penguin) 1957 J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Little, Brown) 1961 John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (Anchor) 1963-68 (selections) Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (HarperCollins) 1967 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Knopf) 1970 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (Vintage) 1976 (selections) Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Picador) 1980 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Vintage) 1985 Philip Roth, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin) 2000 Edward P. Jones, The Known World (Amistad) 2003 Students' Choice Novel for Spring, 2008: Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (Houghton-Mifflin) 2002 Requirements: Students must complete the readings, explore archival material on the web for selected authors and attend all lectures. Students must enroll in a section in order to take the course; attendance at section will not only enhance the intellectual benefit and pleasure of the course (and will fill out 5% of your grade) but will also help you in preparing the papers. Your papers and exams will be graded by your TF. Written work will consist of: 1. Two graded papers: each a literary analysis of a single text, minimum 5 pages, maximum 8 pages. 2. Final exam: will cover the whole semester; identifications, passage readings, and one essay. The papers, lectures and section discussions, if pursued with energy and attended regularly, should prepare you well for the exam. Grading: Paper 1: 30% Paper 2: 30% Final exam: 35% Discussion section attendance and participation: 5% Yale University 2008. 쟔ome rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0) Lecture 1 - Introductions Overview: In this first lecture Professor Hungerford introduces the course's academic requirements and some of its central concerns. She uses a magazine advertisement for James Joyce's Ulysses and an essay by Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita, a novel on the syllabus) to establish opposing points of view about what is required to be a competent reader of literature. The contrast between popular emotional appeal and detached artistic judgment frames literary debates from the Modernist, and through the post-45 period. In the second half of lecture, Hungerford shows how the controversies surrounding the publication of Richard Wright's Black Boy highlight the questions of truth, memory, and autobiography that will continue to resurface throughout the course. Reading assignment: None assigned Lecture 2 - Richard Wright, Black Boy Overview: Professor Amy Hungerford continues her discussion of Richard Wright's classic American autobiography, Black Boy. Through a close analysis of key passages, she demonstrates an oscillation in the narrative between the socioeconomic deprivations and racial jeopardy confronting its characters, and the compensations to be found in sensual experience, the imagination, and in particular, the power of words. Dramatizing the editorial struggle evident in letters between Wright and Book-of-the-Month-Club-President Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Professor Hungerford shows the high stakes of Wright's uncompromising portrait of America's failed ideals at a time when those ideals are being tested during the Second World War. Reading assignment: Richard Wright, Black Boy (selections: 1-83, 244-283, original published ending, in note on 412-415); Letters between Dorothy Canfield-Fisher and Richard Wright about revising the ending of Black Boy for the Book of the Month Club. Lecture 3 - Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood Overview: Professor Amy Hungerford's first lecture on Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood addresses questions of faith and interpretation. She uses excerpts from O'Connor's copious correspondence to introduce the critical framework of O'Connor's Catholicism, but invites us to look beyond the question of redemption. What do characters see in this text, and what are they blind to? What do we see as readers, and how does methodology shape this vision? Reading assignment: Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1949) Lecture 4 - Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (cont.) Overview: In this second lecture on Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Professor Amy Hungerford continues to offer several specific contexts in which to read and understand the novel. Having used O'Connor's letters to delve into her theological commitments in the previous lecture, Professor Hungerford now explores the southern social context, particularly with respect to race and gender, and the New Critical writing program of which O'Connor was a product. Hungerford finally suggests that O'Connor's writing illuminates the important--and perhaps undertheorized--link between the institutionalization of formal unity by the New Critics, and their strong religious influences. Reading assignment: Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1949) Lecture 5 - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Overview: Professor Amy Hungerford introduces the first of three lectures on Nabokov's Lolita by surveying students' reactions to the novel, highlighting the conflicting emotions readers feel, enjoying Nabokov's virtuosic style, but being repelled by the violence of his subject matter. Nabokov's childhood in tsarist Russia provides some foundation for his interest in memory, imagination, and language. Finally, Professor Hungerford shows how Nabokov, through the voice of his protagonist Humbert, in his own voice in the epilogue, and in the voice of "John Ray, Jr." in the foreword, preempts moral judgments in a novel that celebrates the power of the imagination and the seductive thrill of language. Reading assignment: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) Lecture 6 - Guest Lecture by Andrew Goldstone Overview: In this guest lecture, Teaching Fellow Andrew Goldstone provides us with some key concepts for understanding Modernism and Nabokov's relation in particular to his literary forebears T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Positing the "knight's move" as a description of Nabokov's characteristically indirect, evasive style, Goldstone argues that Nabokov's parodies of Modernist form in fact reveal his deep commitment to some of the same aesthetic principles. While the knight's move often indicates a playful attitude towards tradition, it also betrays a traumatic rupture with the past, reflecting a sense of exile that links Nabokov's art with the violence of Lolita's protagonist, Humbert. Reading assignment: None assigned Lecture 7 - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (cont.) Overview: In the last of three lectures on Lolita, Professor Amy Hungerford discusses the broader context of Nabokov's relation to his novel: both the debate it inspires surrounding censorship and artistic originality, and the concern it evokes in him about the work of art's distillation of the living world or word. Hungerford masterfully draws connections between Nabokov's interest in lepidoptery--butterfly collecting--with his evident fear that the printed word become lapidary, or stone-like. Just as we can no longer appreciate the beauty of a butterfly's motion, once it has been pinned down, so too might living language fall victim to a kind of violence on the page, a formal equivalent to the thematic violence that increases as the novel progresses. Reading assignment: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) Lecture 8 - Jack Kerouac, On the Road Overview: Professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on Kerouac's On the Road begins by contrasting the Beats' ambition for language's direct relation to lived experience with a Modernist sense of difficulty and mediation. She goes on to discuss the ways that desire structures the novel, though not in the ways that we might immediately expect. The very blatant pursuit of sex with women in the novel, for example, obscures the more significant desire for connection among men, particularly the narrator Sal's love for Dean Moriarty. The apparent desire for the freedom of the open road, too, Hungerford argues, exists in a necessary conjunction with the idealized comforts of a certain middle-class American domesticity, signaled by the repeated appearance of pie. Reading assignment: Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) Lecture 9 - Jack Kerouac, On the Road (cont.) Overview: In this second lecture on On The Road, Professor Hungerford addresses some of the obstacles and failures to the novel's high ambitions for achieving American community through an immediacy of communication. Sal Paradise's desire to cross