This course examines five seminal works of American fiction: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and Tommy Orange's There There. We discuss the way these writers engage with ideas about identity and belonging, masculinity, violence, and maturity, and how each text reflects its historical and cultural context. By investigating the innovative formal techniques these writers use, students will explore the evolution of American storytelling.
- Anderson, S., Winesburg, Ohio
- Hemingway, E., In Our Time
- Steinbeck, J., Cannery Row
- O’Brien, T., The Things They Carried
- Orange, T., There There
- Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is often cited as the foundation of the American short story cycle or novel-in-stories.
- Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925) is innovative in its juxtaposition of vignettes and short stories to represent the general psychological condition of people in post-World War I America and Europe.
- John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), set during the Great Depression, depicts a group of characters struggling to get by in a fishing district in Monterey California.
- Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), depicts a platoon of American soldiers reckoning with the atrocities of the Vietnam War.
- Tommy Orange’s There There (2019) depicts a disparate group of characters as they converge on their hometown for the Big Oakland Powwow, each reckoning with the legacy of colonization.
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Analyse the stylistic innovations of the selected writers through formal textual analysis, focusing on narrative voice, fragmentation, imagery, and rhizomatic structure.
- Evaluate the broader cultural impact of the selected texts through analysis of each text’s themes, characterisation and the cultural contexts from which they emerged.
- Conduct comparative literary analysis by exploring the differences and similarities in the themes, narrative style, and cultural contexts across texts.
- Assess the ongoing literary influence of these seminal texts.
