Status of the subject: mandatory
Structure of the subject: 3rd Semester, 4 hours per week (2 courses and 2 seminars)
Credits: 3
Teacher: Dr. Bökös Borbála
A survey of the major forms and traditions of American literature from the Puritan Age (Bradstreet, Wigglesworth, Taylor) to the earlien2102-ist-lit-am-1.pdfer 19th century, with emphasis on such writers as Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. The artistic achievement of these writers will be studied in relation to developing literary conventions and cultural patterns in pre-Civil War America.
The primary objective of the seminars is to offer insights into the themes, subjects, representative authors, landmarks and developments in the ’romantic’ period, thus facilitating a better understanding of the texts assigned for the seminars, and enhance motivations for future study and research.
The texts have been chosen from the list of required reading for the examination and they will focus on all the major genres: poetry, the novel, and short prose. Students will become acquainted with the historical and cultural circumstances surrounding the production of a given piece of literature, and will explore the development and expression of some fundamental ideas, assumptions, myths and beliefs that still influence the ways Americans think about themselves and their society. In addition to examining the historical and ideological contexts of a range of fictional works, we will closely examine their aesthetic dimensions and practice ways of identifying various themes, motifs and symbols, and rhetorical strategies.