English 180N

Other Readings and Media

"Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905); James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929); Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985); Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985); Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)

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Description

A survey of the American novel, its forms, patterns, techniques, ideas, cultural context, and intertextua- lity. Special attention will be paid to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics�what is beautiful? how do we know? what ought we do?�in the American milieu as it develops in the twentieth century. Average 250 pages per week. Two papers (5-8 pages); ID midterm; essay final.