Welcome to English 392: The American Novel (1900 to the present)!
This is four-week course in which we will read one novel per week.
The novels are:
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Goals of the course
This course aims to introduce students to the genre of the novel in the American contexts of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. We will examine each work in its historical, social, political, and artistic contexts, thinking about how the novel form in particular engages with modern life. We will think about how the American novel over the last hundred years or so has, on the one hand, struggled with historical and ongoing injustices that challenge American democratic ideals while, on the other hand, imagining a way forward that is at times hopeful, at times held back by the power of history.
As a way of focusing our exploration and looking at the ways that literary form shapes the meanings of each text, we will ask three interrelated questions of each novel. Each of these questions has to do with both literary form and theme:
1) How does each writer use point of view to evoke particular responses in the reader?
2) How does each novel use space and place to create meaning?
3) How does each novel offer ways for today’s readers to move forward out of the past?
On the pages of this course site, you will find some facts about the novels, their authors, and their historical contexts as well as some suggestions about how these works might be interpreted. You will find links to screencasts where I offer readings of specific passages from the novels. These are not meant to be declarations of the what the text “really” means. They are more like conversations with the text, in which I pay close attention to the writer’s language in order to fully enter the world of the novel and to explore the ways it speaks to our contemporary time and place.
You will also find questions that encourage you to form your own judgments and understandings of the novels. There are no absolutely right answers to these questions; in fact they might often lead to more questions. The questions themselves are intended to lead you back into the texts themselves for more exploration and discovery. This is not the same as saying “novels can mean anything you want them to.” You can make a case for a particular reading as long as you can tie it clearly to the actual words and phrases of the text.
To better understand what the American novel is and where it comes from, take a look at this:
A Brief History of the American Novel
Nuts and Bolts
On the Course Syllabus page, you will find a link that enables you to download the syllabus for the course. You will also find links to pages for each novel. Please follow these links as we move through each novel in the course. It will be up to you to time your reading of each novel so that by the middle of each week you’re at least halfway through the novel for that week and by Friday you’ve finished it. Of course reading ahead is fine.
I will use often use email as well as this website to alert you to upcoming deadlines and make other announcements, so remember to check both regularly.
Assignments are outlined on the syllabus, with specifics on the Assignments page. They include:
2-3 sentences introducing yourself on Canvas.
3 close readings assignments (500 words each), due throughout the term.
One creative assignment substituted for one of the close readings, either a screencast of one of the two passage options (explained under the Assignments tab) or a rewrite of the passage from a different character’s point of view (also explained under the Assignments tab).
One quiz every two weeks on the novel for that week plus supporting materials on the website (on Canvas).
One discussion entry and comment on a classmate’s entry every two weeks (on Canvas).
Attendance at three live chat sessions over the course of the term.
(The image above is a painting by African American artist Beauford Delaney entitled Penn Station in War Time, painted in 1943. It’s at the Smithsonian American Art Museum)