Seminar 2

Seminar 1.

Семестр

ТЕМЫ СЕМИНАРСКИХ ЗАНЯТИЙ

1. Colonial writing 1608-1765. Major tendencies, characteristics of American literature during the 17^th century.
2. Travel literature and Histories in Early Virginia.
3. Religious writings. The Puritans: The Immigrant generation (William Bradford; Plymouth Plantation; John Winthrop; Roger Williams; Ann Bradstreet).
4. The Later Puritans: The Drift toward Secularization. Colonial poetry (Edward Taylor; Michael Wigglesworth; Samuel Sewall, Cotton Mother).
5. The literature of 1765-1850. Major tendencies. Historical background.
6. Politics and Pamphlets. Benjamin Franklin as a spokesman for American interests of the 1700’s. His major publications.
7. The peculiarities of Romanticism in America. Short-story genre.
8. Washington Irving, his literary career. “Knickerbockers history of New York”.
9. James Fennimore Cooper, his literary career. “The Leather Stocking Tales”.
10. Abolitionists (William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”).
11. American literature comes of age 1850-1900. Historical background. Transcendentalists. The Boston Brahmins. Individualists. Humorists and Local colorists.
12. E.A. Poe. Biography. Literary career. Major works. Style.
13. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Biography. Literary career. Major works. Style.
14. Herman Melville. Biography. Literary career. Major works. Style.
15. Walt Whitman. Biography. Literary career. Major works. Style.
16. Emily Dickenson. Biography. Literary career. Major works. Style.

1. Mark Twain as the greatest humorist in American literature.
2. American literature from 1900 to 1941. Background. Major tendencies.
3. Innovations on the American poetry of the 1900’s.
4. Theodore Dreiser as the leading exponent of the naturalistic movement.
5. Themes and concepts of the Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” and “American tragedy”.
6. Robert Lee Frost and his finest poems (region’s landscapes, folkways, speech mannerism). Recite one of his poems.
7. The peculiarities of William Faulkner’s style: techniques, themes, tones.
8. “The Sounds and the Fury”- the story told through the seemingly chaotic thoughts of a character.
9. Writers of the “Lost Generation”. Historical background.
10. F.Scott Fitzgerald as the leading writer of America’s Jazz Age.
11. “The Great Gatsby” - penetrating criticism of the moral emptiness of wealthy society in the Unites States during the 1920’s.
12. The lifestyle and literary legacy of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s hero, code, “theory of the iceberg”.
13. The symbolism and philosophy of the Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”.
14. “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck as one of the most powerful novel of social protest in American literature.
15. Anti-fascist motives in the novel “Ship of Fools” by Katherine Porter.
16. “O. Henry twist” – a famous technique of William Sydney Porter.