Syllabus: An American Literary Canon
I promised it, so here it is. This is my reading syllabus for this year when it comes to my choices for an American literary canon.
American: authored in the United States of America or by someone born or connected to the United States (roughly)
Literary: Considered literature in the eyes of the “academy”
Canon: a collection
The Reasons Behind the Syllabus
I created this syllabus for this year for two reasons. Thefirst reason is I plan on being a professor of literature, and I realized thatI haven’t read a lot of the literary “classics” that are in the “canon.”
The second reason is I need to take the Literature in English GRE subject test. This test is a really long test that asks questions on literature from the early-early years (Beowulf, Aristotle, etc.) to the present. The questions range from “What literary theory is presented in this passage?” to “Who wrote this passage?” So, one must be well-read when approaching this test. Hence, this year is for the American literary canon. Next year will be for British and World literature, along with philosophy and literary theory. The following syllabus is created with the end goal of being well prepared for that test.
I’m also creating this syllabus in connection to the Great Courses course, “Classics of American Literature,” which provides lectures that I can listen to while reading. I've also relied heavily on Google and the ninth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
The list is rather exhaustive, clocking in at 16 pages in Word. So, I skimmed it down a little bit for this blog post to just look at the major works I will be reading. If it says "Selected" on it, it means I'm reading the selections found in the ninth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
The other authors I will be doing various activities with, including reading the introductions that the Norton editors so expertly put together and utilizing the wonderful sources we know as Wonderful Wikipedia and the Google God to gather some basic info on them. If you want that exhaustive list, email me and I'll send you the Word doc.
If you have any thoughts or ideas on what I should add to this list, please feel free to share :)
The Syllabus
Beginnings to 1820
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity
Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Thomas Paine, Common Sense
The Federalist Papers
Phillis Wheatley, Selected Works
1820–1865
Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans
Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Selected Poems
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Selected Poems
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Works
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Selected Works
Abraham Lincoln, Selected Speeches
Margaret Fuller, The Great Lawsuit
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick and “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Poems
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Rebecca Hardin Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems
1865–1914
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson
Henry James, A Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Turn of the Screw, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, Selected Works
Kate Chopin, Selected Works
Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, Selected Works
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, Selected Works
Sui Sin Far, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Selected Works
Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Selected Works
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
1914–1945
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Gertrude Stein, Writing of choice
Robert Frost, Selected Poems
Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems
Ezra Pound, Selected Poems
T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Edna St. Vincent Milay, Selected Poems
e. e. Cummings, Selected Poems
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Selected Works
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, Green Hills of Africa, Garden of Eden, A Moveable Feast, In Our Time, Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Thomas Wolfe, “The Lost Boy”
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, Selected Works
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden
Richard Wright, The Man Who Was Almost a Man
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Literature Since 1945
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Theodore Roethke,Selected Works
Eudora Welty, Petrified Man
Elizabeth Bishop,Selected Works
Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh, Desire Under the Elems, LongDay’s Journey into Night, The EmperorJones, The Hairy Ape
John Cheever, “TheSwimmer”
Robert Hayden,Selected Poems
Randall Jarrell, SelectedWorks
Tennessee Williams,A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie
Bernard Malamud, “TheMagic Barrell”
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, SelectedWorks
Toni Morrison, Beloved, The Song of Solomon, Sula,Selected Works
Flannery O’Connor,Selected Works
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
Philip Levine,Sleected Poems
Anne Sexton,Selected Works
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Adrienne Rich,Sleected Works
Ursula K. Le Guin,“Schrödinger’s Cat,” “She Unnames Them”
Sylvia Plath, SelectedPoems, The Bell Jar
John Updike, “Separating,”The Withces of Eastwick
Philip Roth, “Defenderof the Faith,” Novel of choice
Amiri Baraka, SelectedWorks
Audre Lorde,Selected Works
Mary Oliver,Selected Works
Lucille Clifton,Selected Works
Maxine Hong Kingston,The Woman Warrior
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
August Wilson, Fences
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
