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From the author of the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes a highly entertaining and informative book on the twenty-five works of literature that have most shaped the American character.
Thomas C. Foster applies his much-loved combination of wit, know-how, and analysis to explain how each work has shaped our very existence as readers, students, teachers, and Americans. He illuminates
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English
Description
"Sparky Sweets, Ph.D. and Wisecrack present Thug Notes, the outrageously funny, ultra-sharp guide to sixteen of literature's most beloved classics - including The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride & Prejudice and Things Fall Apart. Having already taught millions around the world, Dr. Sweets makes it easy to love and understand these important literary works. With hilarious character breakdowns, masterful analyses, witty observations,...
Author
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English
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"White Flights is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of the book, Jess Row ties "white flight"--the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns--to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping...
4) The crucible
Author
Language
English
Description
The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft - and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village. About this author: Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright...
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English
Description
Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa tells us that the border is "una herida abierta [an open wound] where... the lifeblood of two worlds is merging to form a third country, a border culture." This program explores the literature of the Chicano borderlands and its beginnings in the literature of Spanish colonization.
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English
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Even as the poets were fostering a rebellion, contemporary prose writers began creating a new American tradition comprised of many strands, many voices, and many myths about the past. This program explores the search for identity by three American writers: Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Leslie Feinberg.
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English
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Set in the antebellum American South, but written after emancipation, Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains a classic of American literature. This program compares Twain's depiction of Southern vernacular culture to that of Charles Chestnutt and Kate Chopin, and in doing so, introduces the hallmarks of American Realism.
10) Native Voices
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English
Description
Native Americans had established a rich and highly developed tradition of oral literature long before the writings of the European colonists. This program explores that richness by introducing Native American oral traditions through the work of three contemporary authors: Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo).
12) Social Realism
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English
Description
This program presents the authors of the American Gilded Age, such as Edith Wharton, and juxtaposes them with social realists like Anzia Yezierska. These writers expose the double world that made up turn-of-the-century New York: that of the elite and that of the poorest of the poor. Which of these realities is the more truly American?
13) Masculine Heroes
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English
Description
In 1898, Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier as the defining feature of American culture, but American authors had uncovered its significance much earlier. This program turns to three key writers of the early national period, James Fenimore Cooper, John Rollin Ridge, and Walt Whitman, and examines the influential visions of American manhood offered by each author.
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English
Description
For many, the 1960s mark the true end of modern America. Whereas the modernists remained serious about the transcendent nature of art, the artists of the 1960s wanted an art that was relevant. They wanted an art that not only spoke about justice, but also helped create it. This program explores the innovations made in American poetry in the 1960s by Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Adrienne Rich.
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English
Description
The Enlightenment brought new ideals and a new notion of self-hood to the American colonies. This program begins with an examination of the importance of the trope of the self-made man in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and then turns to the development of this concept in the writings of Romanticist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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Jazz filled the air and wailed against the night. Caught in the sway, American prose writers sought out the forbidden, the slang, the dialects, and the rhythms of the folk and of everyday life. Writers such as Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald forged a new style: one which silhouetted the geometry of language, crisp in its own cleanness.
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My subject in fiction, Flannery O'Connor tells us, "is the action of grace in the territory held largely by the devil." One might do well to ask what, if not the devil, haunts the American South in this era between the wars. This program uncovers the revisioning of Southern myths during the modernist era by writers William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston.
18) Utopian Promise
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English
Description
When British colonists landed in the Americas, they created communities that they hoped would serve as a "light onto the nations." But what role would the native inhabitants play in this new model community? This program compares the answers of two important groups, the Puritans and Quakers, and exposes the lasting influence they had upon American identity.
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English
Description
Amidst the chaos following World War I, Ezra Pound urged poets to "Make it new!" This call was heeded by a large range of poets, ranging from T. S. Eliot to Jean Toomer. This program explores the modernist lyrics of two of these poets: William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes. What is modernism? How did these poets start a revolution that continues until this day?
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English
Description
How has slavery shaped the American literary imagination and American identity? This program turns to the classic slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass and the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe. What rhetorical strategies do their works use to construct an authentic and authoritative American self?