American Literature: 1865 to Present (English 120B)

• ENGL-120B Survey of American Literature: 1865 to Present
• Spring 2012 - Register using WebAdvisor
  • Section 052492
  • Tuesday, Thursday
  • 11:45am - 1:20pm
  • Room 4201, Building 4, second floor, Fremont campus
  • Instructor: Bruce Bennett
• 3 units
• Transferable to UC and CSU

The Works! Transcendentalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Students will read and discuss classic American short stories, poetry, drama, and novels and will become familiar with great American writers.

Innovators, Expressionists, and Experimentalists

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

• the author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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;

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  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 Bruce Bennett for additional information about this class.