Professor Philip Fisher English 178x Barker 153 Lectures MW 11 English 178x The American Novel: James and

Dreiser to the Present. English 178x is meant to provide, above all, training in the reading and analysis of texts. Three goals will guide the lectures, worksheets, reading assignments, short papers and take home final exam within this course. First: to give a detailed critical reading of a representative set of classic American novels written between 1900 and 2009. Second: to define a basic set of narrative terms such as motif, character, plot, narrator, time, setting and objects. Third: to connect the novels and short stories into the wider questions of 20th century American culture. A starting list of such concerns would include: 1. Personality, character and role within a mobile, economic society of immigration and temporary location-- a culture of creative destruction. 2. Male Culture-Female Culture: their opposition and negotiation in American Experience. 3. The Regional, National and International cultures of Modernism. 4. The discarding of the 19th century social (marriage) novel. What replaced this stable form? 5. American urban culture and its relation to novel forms based on small town life. 6. The narrative impact of the new psychological models of experience, personal history, trauma, memory and the disorder of personal stories: war and its representation. 7. Newspaper and Film techniques of narration, visualization and symbol creation: the growth of popular, often visual, media and the effect of this rivalry on the novel. 8. The short story form and modern experience. 9. Aestheticism, the cult of beauty, impermanence and death as a modern version of the heroic... 10. Literary Naturalism and the end of the "moral tradition" in literature. 11. Experiments with time, duration, and juxtaposition within the novel.

************************************************************* Requirements: Course requirements include 1. Attendance at lectures and active participation in weekly section meetings, 2. Lengthy reading assignments and worksheets. 3. 7 page paper due in section on Thursday. February 24 in section 4. 7 page paper due Thursday March 31 in section 5. short written assignments due in section throughout the term 6. A three to five hour take home final exam: May 4-May 5 (Note this Date). The take home final will take place during the Reading Period in May.) Weekly Section meetings will begin in the week of February 2.

Texts Primary Texts will be available at the COOP, but may also be purchased (in various editions) on line very inexpensively at bookfinder.com and many other sites; Cather, My Antonia; Wharton, The Age of Innocence; Hemingway; In Our Time and A Farewell to Arms; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night; Salinger, Catcher in the Rye; Ellison, Invisible Man; Nabokov, Lolita; Bellow, Herzog; Ha Jin, Waiting. Short stories will also be assigned, including work by James, Anderson, London, Faulkner, Salinger, Beattie, Ford, Wallace, Munro, Franzen and Lahiri.

Professor Philip Fisher English 178x Barker 153 Lectures MW 11

Schedule of Readings and Lectures

Part I. 1900-1960. From a 19th century culture symbolized by its landscapes and by its relation to nature, wilderness and the sublime to a 20th century culture registered in the life of a woman within an economy. The Literary form of Naturalism. The Idea of an Environment and determinism. The economic topics of Eros, possession, performance and culture. The city novel and the new meaning of "free." Nostalgia for society and community. The international novel and the road novel. Actress, patient, child. Realism and Naturalism; Darwinian Novel of environment; Nature, the city, sectors of society as environments. Extreme conditions, the type. Human agency, chance, necessity. The novel in a world of newspapers and theater. The female heroine and the male observer. . Aestheticism as alternative to Naturalism. Manners, Behavior, "Bad Behavior Intimacy and exclusion. January 24Introduction to the Course. Jack London, To Build a Fire (1908) January 26--Willa Cather, My Antonia Dover Thrift Edition January 31-- Willa Cather, My Antonia Dover Thrift Edition and story by Jhumpa Lahiri 2008 February 2-- Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle (1903) and stories by Edith Wharton and Jonathan Franzen February 7--Wharton, The Age of Innocence Jamesian consciousness; inwardness; the edge of society February 9-- Wharton, The Age of Innocence and Mary Gaitskill, "Orchid." Updating the novel of behavior; crossing the line; exclusion. Class and society as environments. Anthropology of behavior in society. February 14 ---Nabokov, Lolita February 16 ---Nabokov, Lolita February 21 no class Presidents Day (Lincoln) First paper due in section Thursday February 24 (7 pages) Part Two. 1920-2000 Modernism and after; Experimentation with time and order within narration. The cluster of short stories woven into a social novel. Radical individualism and grotesque identity. Newspaper narration, Film narration and Modernism. The collapse and critique of Puritan culture in and after World War I. The representation of war from Hemingway to Salinger and Tim OBrien. The renormalization of modernist experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Television, letters, talk: the comedy of narration in a world of media. The return of the novel of immigration during the second wave of immigration (1980 to the present). . Section A. Modernism. The 1920s myth of its own experience February 23-- Selected Stories from Winesburg OhioMother, Adventure The Untold Lie Death Hands Paper Pills. And Alice Munro, Five Points

Professor Philip Fisher English 178x Barker 153 Lectures MW 11 February 28-- Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and Faulkner, "That Evening Sun" March 2---Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury March 7--Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms and the stories collected in In Our Time. March 9--Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms and the stories collected in In Our Time March 12 to March 20 Spring recess March 21Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night The great alibi literature March 23-- Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night and Ann Beattie, "Greenwich" Time"

Section B. Renormalizing Modernism; breakdown novels; consciousness and the ethical hero March 28Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye March 30-- Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye March 31. 7 page paper due in Section April 4Bellow, Herzog April 6--- Bellow, Herzog and David Foster Wallace, The Depressed Person April 11Ellison, Invisible Man April 13Ellison, Invisible Man Conclusion: The New Elsewhere and the New Here and Now April 18-- Ha Jin, Waiting. The new America. Immigration and what a novelist knows. April 20-- Ha Jin, Waiting and stories by Jhumpa Lahiri April 25Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen April 27-- Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen

Final Exam: three to five hour take home exam May 4 or overnight May 4 to 5. The exam can be taken during the day or overnight.