List of courses, Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw

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American Literature English version

AMERICAN LITERATURE

120	The Idea of America in Literature	PS
	A chronological survey of works in which American writers created representations of their country as a myth, ideal society, or a paradise lost. Mainly prose, from colonial to modern literature.
121	American Drama	K
	This course covers the major works of American drama in the 20th century. It provides a background in the history of drama and analysis of theatre in America. It examines plays by Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard.
122	African-American Literature	K
	The aim of this course is to provide an overview of African-American literature from the times of slavery, through Reconstruction, Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement to the present times. The course discusses African-American poetry, fiction and drama.
125	American Apocalypse (18th-Century till Modern Times)	K
	The course examines the Christian concept of apocalypse in American Literature. The course considers how apocalyptic thinking developed to explain and shape the Puritan world and the 19th-century America. It also examines the relationship between contemporary literature and apocalypse, visions of degeneration, entropy, and the ultimate end.
127	Poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson	PS
	Analysis and interpretation of selected representative texts by two greatest American poets of the 19th-century, in light of the aesthetics of Romanticism.
128	American Short Story	K
	The course concentrates on the historical development of the American short story. Among the issues discussed during the course there are: early short-story forms, short story and regional writing, short-story cycle, ethnic short stories, postmodern short stories, science-fiction short stories.
129	Introduction to American Postmodernism: Theory and Practice	PS
	The aim of the course is to study theoretical assumptions, the practice and the critical reception of American postmodernism. Readings include novels, short stories, poetry, and criticism. Central terms: literature of exhaustion, metafiction, intertextuality, autotelism, pastiche, irony.
130	American Poetry after World War II	PS
	A survey course of the works of authors representing the beat generation, contemporary language poetry, projective verse, the so-called confessional and New York schools, as well as selected poets representing ethnic minorities. Required readings include poems and several brief critical essays.
131	20th-Century Women Writers	PS
	The course examines themes and narrative strategies in the fictional writing of major American female writers : Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Naylor.
132	Time and History in William Faulkner	PS
	Analysis of the time of fiction and the time of history and myth as the basic constituents of William Faulkner's output (including analysis of ca 5 texts).
133	American Innovative Fiction After World War Two	PS
	The course concerns itself with the most important innovative tendencies in post-war American prose. The topics to be discussed include: postmodern fiction, critical observations made by postmodern writers, New Journalism - theory and practice, innovative autobiographical narratives , magic realism.
134	Images of War in Contemporary American Literature	K
	This course examines literary representations of major military conflicts in modern American history, opening up a forum for discussion on the poetics and historical self-awareness of contemporary American literature about war.
136	20th-century American Writers of the South	PS
	The course provides an overview of major developments in the 20th- century literature of the American South. The authors discussed are: E. Glasgow, W. Faulkner, T. Williams, E. Welty, W. Styron, W. Percy, C. McCullers, F. O'Connor, P.Conroy.
138	Male and Female Archetypes in American Fiction	PS
	This is an introductory course in the examination of what could be termed archetypal figures in American fiction. It explores the presentation of male and female characters, looking at recurrent types and relating them to American popular myths and society.
139	American Feminist Criticism	PS
	The aim of the course is to present the most important questions of feminist criticism and to study the classics of American feminist criticism of the 20th century, as well as some of the newest works of American feminists.
1201	Major Works of Canadian Literature	PS
	A survey course introducing major works of Canadian Literature, from. the middle of the 19th century up to the present. A major premise of the course is to explore how Canadian literature differs from the American literature written in the same period and what the themes are that interest Canadian writers.
1202	Black Women Writers	PS
	The course provides an overview of major female writers, poets and playwrights of Black America. Topics for discussion include women authors and black aesthetics, black orality, family, and community in African-American literature. List of authors includes also writers of Caribbean origin.
1204	Slavery in American Literature	PS
	The course examines the topic of slavery in American Literature. Much focus is given to differences in the treatment of slavery in white and black literature, the problem of the "appropriation" of voice, as well as narrative strategies to overcome silence and racial prejudices. The authors discussed include: H. Melville, W. Faulkner, W. Styron, T. Morrison, S. Williams.
1207	American Modernist Fiction I	PS
	Survey and analysis of main ideological concerns and experimental narrative techniques in the works of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and others.
1208	Contemporary Jewish Writing in America
	The course introduces major 20th-century American fiction writers of Jewish origin: P. Roth, B. Malamud, S. Bellow, I. B. Singer, L. Begley, G. Paley, C. Ozick. During the course, attention will be paid to the stylistic and thematic aspects of the works of individual authors as well as to their attempts to present generalizing views of the Jewish experience in America.
1210	Latino Literature	PS
	The course provides a chronological overview of American writers of Hispanic origin with a special emphasis on Mexican American writers. Topics discussed include links with "el boom" writers of Latin America, the significance of folk tradition and folk mythology, heritage of mestizaje, experimentation with the form of the novel (magic realism, Spanish tradition of the picaresque novel, autofiction).
1212	Asian American Writers	PS
	The course offers an introduction to Asian American literature. It traces the development of Asian American discourse and examines some of its major themes, including the dynamics of recovering / inventing a 'usable' past, poetics / politics of language and globalization . The syllabus includes writers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South Asian heritage.
1301	A Study of an American Poet	PS
	A detailed study of a given poet's work. Required readings may include biographical material, letters, criticism.
1302	The Study of an American Prose Writer	PS
	Close reading of novels, short stories, essays and letters by a major American writer. Overview of critical works on the subject.
220	American Renaissance	PS
	The course focuses on the major figures of the American Renaissance: R.W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, N. Hawthorne, H. Melville, W. Whitman and others. The aim of the course is to emphasize the diversity of the texts representing the American Renaissance and to present this literary phenomenon in a broad historical context. Attention is also paid to contemporary debates over the American Renaissance.
223	Modernism in American Poetry I (E. Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. C. Williams)	PS
	A chronological and detailed study of selected poems written by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams in the "heroic" period of American and European modernism (1910-1930). Required readings may also include poems by other authors and some literary criticism.
225	The American Essay	PS
	Analysis of selected articles, essays, manifestoes and letters of American writers; studies of the forms of the genre at the level of style, rhetoric, structure, etc. . Moreover, a selection of texts by representatives of American minorities in order to present the intellectual atmosphere and sources of conflicts in a given epoch.
226	The Puritan Origins of American Literature	PS
	Historiography, letters, diaries, sermons and poems by American Puritans in the context of the evolution of Puritan theology in the 17th and 18th centuries.
227	Postmodernism and Beyond	PS
	A survey of postmodernism in American literature, based on 8 - 10 texts by several authors, published in the sixties and later. One of the aims of the course is to examine postmodernist influences in fiction published between 1970 and the present. Another is to compare early theories of postmodernism with subsequent theoretical and literary texts as well as with recent cultural criticism. Some aspects of postmodernist philosphy will be discussed in the course.
230	American Poetry after World War II	PS
	A general survey of the poetry scene after 1945, illustrated with detailed analyses of selected poems by such authors as A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Lyn Hejinian, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, James Schuyler.
232	Male and Female Archetypes in American Literature	PS
	This course will be a more advanced version of course 131. The archetypes will be considered closely in accordance with theories of Jungian psychology. Depth psychology and others from psychological criticism will be applied to the study of some important works of American literature, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper and continuing up to the present day.
233	American Detective Fiction	PS
	This course will consist of a study of the evolution of the American detective novel. It examines commentary by critical theorists on the genre of the detective story, including essays by T.Todorov and U. Eco. The readings will include short stories by E. A. Poe, the classic hard-boiled stories of the 1930s and 1940s, as exemplified by Hammett and Chandler, and the so-called psychological detective novels by contemporary authors.
235	Memory, Tradition, and History in American Literature	PS
	The course will explore the role of memory, tradition, and history in American Literature. It will examine the changing paradigm of memory in American literature: from a Transcendental break with the past in the 19th- century, through the modernist valorization of individual memory to the postmodern rejection of time in favor of space.
236	American and Transatlantic Modernism	PS
	Problematization of the major issues behind the American and European modernist aesthetics in its cultural contexts, on the basis of selected literary works (Faulkner, Stein, Henry Miller, Nathanael West, and others), critical/theoretical texts (Lukacs, Benjamin, Eagleton), and philosophical debates (Heidegger, Sartre, Adorno).
237	Women Poets of American Modernism	PS
	Modernist aesthetics in the work of American women poets of the first half of the 20th c. Connections of aesthetical/rhetorical issues with the problematics of class, race and gender in the poetry and prose of H.D., Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, and others.
238	The American Gothic: Origins and Developments	PS
	The course highlights the expansive character of the Gothic mode in American literature and film. The course analyzes the modifications of the gothic convention across two centuries, starting with the end of the 18th century. Among the authors of interest, there are: Ch. B. Brown, E.A. Poe, H. Melville, Ch. P. Gilman, H. James, E. Wharton, W. Faulkner, T. Capote, J.C. Oates.
239	Reading Post Colonial Literature	PS
	An examination of postcolonial literature and critical works in English. Writers from the former British colonies, now the Commonwealth, will be studied and those from the so-called Second and Third Worlds - namely Canada, Africa, South Africa, India, Australia and the Caribbean among others. It will be an attempt to explore, among others, these texts' "double vision." The course complements one already offered in the French Department on la francophonie, which explores postcolonial literature in French from the former French colonies in North America.
2200	Narratology	K
	The course provides an overview of major critical texts which are devoted to the study of the novel with a special emphasis on essays by American authors. Students will be introduced to the variety of texts ranging from essays written by N.Hawthorne, H.James and E, Auerbach's and 20th-century essays which come from representatives of major critical schools (M. Bakhtin, M. Schorer, N. Frye, T. Todorov, S. Chatman, P. Brooks, W. Iser, J. Kristeva, R. Barthes).
2201	Afro-American Novel after the 1930s: Practice and Critical Perspectives	PS
	The course examines Afro-American novel from the 1930s. It provides a chronological overview beginning with the novel of the Harlem Renaissance, naturalistic novel, the novel of magic realism and postmodern novel. Thee course introduces also the basis of Afro-American literary criticism. The authors discussed are: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Melvin Kelley, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman.
2202	Canadian Contemporary Fiction	PS
	Intended as a more advanced study of Canadian narratives in short story and novel, this course will examine works by contemporary writers such as Margaret Atwood, Roberston Davies, Margaret Laurence, Michael Ondaatje and others. It explores the three voices of the literature today, taking into account major works by new Canadians. It will also introduce leading literary theorists in Canada, who are concerned with how to "write a new country" and will explore what makes this writing different from that of Americans in the U.S.A.
2203	Elegiac Poetry in America	PS
	A study of the tradition of American elegiac poetry from the Puritan elegy, through 19th century classic samples of the genre by Whitman and Emerson, to the new generic paradigms in the poetry of women and ethnic minorities. Freudian ideas on "mourning and melancholia" as well as problematizations of "the work of mourning" by Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan provide the theoretical reference for the analysis.
2205	Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Literature	A+PS
	The aim of the course is to study the basic concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis as well as the writings of selected authors (such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray) who used those concepts in their work, often redefining them and enriching psychoanalysis with new discoveries. Among the most important questions discussed in the course is the problem of sexual difference as defined by psychoanalysis, the place of language in human psyche, and the uses of psychoanalysis in literary studies.
2220	Ethnic Literature in Canada: from Native Peoples to Hyphenated Peoples	PS
	This course features an analysis of ethnic literature as a major element in the voice of Canadian literature today and as a distinct form of New World discourse. It examines works by Canada's Natives Peoples and by other writers of ethnic origin, so-called "hyphenated Canadians." The list includes Jewish authors, South Asian writers and writers of Chinese and Japanese origin.
2230	Modernism in American Poetry II	PS
	Close readings of selected poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein and Gwendolyn Brooks. The main themes of the course are experimentation versus traditionalism, the Romantic backgrounds of Modernist poetry, and the historical contexts of each poet's work.
320	Critical Theories of American Literature	E
	Discussion of the major literary theories functioning in 20th-c. America (New Criticism, reader-response, structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, New Historicism) on the basis of selected essays.Required: credits for a 2-point course in American poetry.
321	Theory of Poetic Language	K
	General problems of poetics and style (major rhetorical tropes: metaphor, metonymy/synecdoche, symbol, irony, problems of versification) in connection with close reading of selected American poems.Required: credits for a 2-point course in American or English poetry.
322	Ideology and Aesthetics: Critical Theories of American Literature	K
	Discussion of outstanding 20th-century critical theories concerning American literature, beginning with American Renaissance by F.O. Matthiessen, The American Adam by R.W.B. Lewis, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, and others, and ending with the studies of Sacvan Bercovitch, Myra Jehlen, Nina Baym et al., from the 1980s and 1990s.
1516	Love and the Family in Twentieth Century African-American Writing	PS
	A close reading of three African-American novels focusing on the historical reasons for which African-American families functioned differently than those of Euro-Americans and on the literary representations of these differences.
	American Poetry in Translation	PS
	An initiation into the mysteries of translation. A detailed analysis of at least 12 poems in existing Polish translations, side by side with the original texts.

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