this course aims to give you a foretaste of the wealth and variety of American literature in the 19th and early 20th century, to get you to know some of the absolute classics that your future American friends and colleagues are likely to have read or studied when they were your age or younger. Over such a short period, we can only attempt a short glimpse, reading extracts from novels, or entire poems and short stories when possible. We will use the medium of film or sound recordings whenever possible in order to confront sound, image and text. Here is a tentative list of the works we might read from :
Edgar Allan Poe : The Raven / The Philosophy of Composition / The Purloined Letter
Herman Melville : Moby Dick / Bartleby
Walt Whitman : Leaves of Grass
Henry James : The Turn of the Screw
Francis Scott Fitzgerald : The Love of the Last Tycoon
Ernest Hemingway : For whom the Bell Tolls
William Faulkner : As I lay dying
Vladimir Nabokov : Lolita