Bruce Bennett
English Instructor

American Lit (English 120B) - The Works! (Transcendentalism to Postmodernism)

Innovators, Expressionists, and Experimentalists

• Sylvia Plath battles her Oedipal colossus in her confessional poem Daddy;

• the author of The Great Gatsby portrays Hollywood as a “fallen Eden”;

• Ernest Hemingway’s macho heroes fight against their own emotions;

• American gothic William Faulkner creates his own fictional realm Yoknapatawpha County to explore family, race, and racism in the postbellum South;

• Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ forgotten 19th century story becomes a literary anthem for 20th century feminists;

• beat poet Allen Ginsburg recites his epic poem Howl in San Francisco after it is censored for obscenity;

• a huge moose looms out of the dark as a religious epiphany for the travelers in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Moose;

• Langston Hughes uses rhythms of jazz and blues in his poems of the Harlem Renaissance;

• Amy Tan’s stories reveal conflicts between Chinese mothers and their American born daughters in her best-selling The Joy Luck Club;

• Robert Frost’s homespun lyrics conceal a darker vision;

• the artist’s imagination replaces God in Wallace Stevens’s metaphysical and musical poetry;

• Tim O’Brien’s soldiers carry love, longing, and loneliness along with their weapons (M-60, M-16, and M-79) in Viet Nam;

• winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, African-American writer Toni Morrison plunges the reader into her postmodern world of sexualized violence and racial identity…

Please contact me for additional information about this class.

Contact Information

Bruce Bennett
English Instructor
bbennett@ohlone.edu
(510) 659-6149
Office Location: Building 2, Room 2304
Office Hours: Posted outside my office

Learn more about me: read the newspaper article that appeared in Ohlone's Monitor.