AN23000BA AMERICAN LITERATURE 1: Seminar in 19th-Century U.S. Literature
A multi-genre introductory course of study created for the purposes of familiarizing students with representative literary texts and authors from the "classic" period of American literature. The course material will thus focus, with the exception of drama, on all the major genres: poetry, the novel, short prose (the essay and the "tale"). Authors to be discussed are Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Herman Melville (1819-1891), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Mark Twain (1835-1910), and Stephen Crane (1871-1900).
AN23001BA American Literature 2: SEMINAR IN TWENTIETH–CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE WORLD WAR TWO
This is a BA-level, multi-genre, introductory course of study created for the purposes of familiarizing students with representative literary texts and authors—as well as with attendant theoretical issues—from the age of American literary modernism in the first half of the 20th century. The course material will thus focus on all the major genres: poetry, drama, prose fiction (including 3 novels and 11 short prose pieces).
AN3001MA SELECTED TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERARY AND CULTURAL HISTORY: Portraits and Landmarks in 19th- and Early 20th-century U.S. Literature, I-II (MA first year)
This retrospective course of study has been designed to offer students of American Studies in the Master’s Program an extension of previously acquired knowledge pertaining to the literary culture of the United States from 1800 to World War Two. Thus the principal objectives of this double lecture course are both the consolidation of earlier exposure to a new cultural/literary awareness and the broadening of horizons. The thematic range of the lectures has been designed to foreground selected literary and cultural historical processes, peaks of development, theoretical issues, authorial achievements, as well as major shifts and turning-points for a period of a century and a half in the literary culture of 19th- and 20th-century America. Representative examples of selected themes will include varieties of American thought in classic (i.e., 19th century-) U.S. literature and American expressiveness in the early 20th century, paradigm shifts in American culture, the special problematic and contradictory impulses within American naturalism (as opposed to European naturalisms), peaks of literary maturity (for instance, the 1850s and the 1930s), the Muckraking Movement, Muckraking fiction and nonfiction, the Roaring Twenties, the Lost Generation, the Depression Era, 20th-century “American Renaissances,” the Revolt from the Village, the New Poetry, Imagism, the Modernist movement in Europe and America, the Modernist aesthetic, favored Modernist techniques, “mythical methods,” cultural myths in America, the cultural situation of the American writer, canonicity, the restructuring of U.S. literature, institutions of the literary culture, literary awards, etc.
AN3015MA01 REGIONALISM IN NORTH-AMERICAN CULTURE AND LITERATURE: PROSE LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH IN THE 20th CENTURY: WHITE AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN VOICES
This course will examine four major themes in 20th-century American prose: (1) the 20th-century flowering of Southern writing, the Southern Renaissance; (2) the African American experience and the changing image of Black Americans in the light of ideological, literary, and historical trends, from the beginning of the century to the 1980s; (3) the iconology of Southern living as documented in the prose literature discussed; and (4) new departures in the critical assessment of women’s and African American writing. * Close attention will be given to the powerful way in which selected authors, both white and African American, male and female, use class, sense of place, Southern identity, established conventions of Southern writing, the agrarian impulse, racial conflict, myth, regional religion, regional civil religion, local color, inherited clichés of literary stereotypy, and oral tradition to shape their fiction.
AN33004BA06 ETHNIC AND MINORITY VOICES IN AMERICAN EXPRESSIVENESS: Aspects of Culture and Ideology (BA third year)
The primary objective of this course of study—offered in a lecture + seminar format—is to provide a road map for subsequent studies, ultimately for a better understanding of the culture of the United States. Despite the historical prevalence of large-scale assimilationism in U.S. society, ethnic/minority diversity, cultural pluralism, and the recent multicultural championing of difference have contributed to the vision of an increasingly more mosaic-like patterning of American society. They have also been contributory to both latent and explicit intergroup oppositions and, ultimately, to the emergence of ideological formations that tend to repudiate alternative frames of reference. This contestive terrain, while replete with conflict, contradiction and paradox, has also substantially contributed to the dynamic quality of cultural expressiveness in U.S. society. The growing presence of formerly marginalized minorities and the increasingly more effective articulation of their priorities have challenged the once dominant ideological position of Anglo-Saxonism and WASP(M) interests.
The core conceptuality attendant in this course of study will include ethnic versus minority distinctions, ethnocentrism, ethno-political considerations, ethnic identity groups, multiethnic (literature), race and racism, racial stratification, "cultural divide," "hyphenates," "hyphenated diplomacy," immigration, canon/curriculum debates, centrifugality vs. centripetality, cultural pluralism, multiculturalism (both in its MC1 and MC2 variants), othering, stereotypy, ethnic images (e.g. in the entertainment industry), racial stereotypes, tokenism, affirmative action, etc. It will also be necessary to dispel misunderstanding re oft-used ethnic identifiers such as Chicano/a or “Scotch-Irish” versus “Celtic Irish,” etc. In addition to these conceptualizations, the course will focus—within the "larger ethnicity"—on four dominant clusters of Americans.
AN34002 and AN3013MA01 TOPICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE 1900: REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS IN THE LITERARY CULTURE FROM COLONIAL TIMES TO THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY
The study of representative texts from the colonial period through the Age of Reason and the Romantic Age to the end of the 19th century. The selected authors include Captain John Smith (1580-1631), Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Edward Taylor (c.1642-1729), Mary Rowlandson (c.1635-c.1678), Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727), Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813), Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Royall Tyler (1757-1826), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896). The list also includes two authors re-visited: Cooper and Melville. * The inner core of the dominant conceptuality of the course will include the religious philosophy of Puritanism, colonialism, the Enlightenment ethos, preromanticism, romanticism, rival interpretations of democracy, the changing image of Native Americans, English literary antecedents (primarily the 17th-century metaphysical poets [cf. Edward Taylor] and restoration drama [re Royall Tyler], the moral implications of slavery, apologies of the peculiar institution, and stereotypy.
AN34413 THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN CULTURE
In view of the fact that students of English in Hungary study American culture only in text, not as experience, it is essential to identify those building blocks of the target culture that can make understanding and interpreting ("reading") this very culture possible. Precisely for this reason the present course of study is new and experimental, long overdue both in our North American specialization program and generally in American Studies instruction and curricula in Hungary. The course has been designed for the purposes of identifying, exploring, examining and classifying the most substantial image banks (culture-specific signifiers and identifiers: iconic configurations, stereotypes, imagological identifiers, shorthand references, and other "fragmented manifestations" [tropes, buzzwords, ideologemes, slogans, motifs, etc.]) that can helpfully facilitate a better understanding of American culture, including the literary culture. The basic assumption behind the course is that these building blocks are seen as letters in a kind of cultural alphabet which can be appropriated. In other words, they can be learnt. Beyond clarifying the most relevant theoretical and conceptual issues of this course of study and besides acquiring a sort of road map for further study, students in this seminar will be encouraged to approach the material chosen creatively in that they will be given the opportunity to come up with their own ideas pertaining both to the basic theoretical underpinnings of the raison d'être of the course as well as the selection and classification of the material processed. The new knowledge generated in this course of study is adaptable to the study of other cultures, past, present and future.
AN34609 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
This multi-genre seminar―an extension of previous studies pertaining to black expressiveness in American literature―is designed for senior students of English specializing in American Studies. The primary aim of this course of study is to acquaint students with representative texts pertaining to African American literature and thought. The prospective members of the seminar have had previous exposure to black literature, thus to several authors of the African American literary culture such as Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Mari Evans, etc. The present seminar will widen the scope of inquiry in two ways: (1) by "revisiting" established black authors previously encountered; and (2) by including African American authors, thus texts, hitherto not discussed:, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Lorainne Hansberry, Etheridge Knight, LeRoi Baraka/Jones, Sonia Sanchez, etc. Among the subjects discussed special attention will be devoted to the 19th-century origins of black expressiveness, historically generated ideological dilemmas concerning the Black ethnicity, the protest tradition as a shaping factor, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the evolution of Black drama, new directions and contemporary voices, etc. Because of its crucial influence on black portrayal, stereotypy, and the future options of the African American novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe's internationally known blockbuster, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) will also be included.
Last update:
2023. 06. 08. 11:03