AML 3311 - Spring 2026 - Rafferty
Spring
2026
AML 3311-0002
MAJOR FIGURES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: Steinbeck and Contemporaries
Kris Rafferty
| In this course, students will be assigned readings that place John Steinbeck’s texts with that of contemporary writers in the United States predominantly during the first half of the twentieth century. Steinbeck’s formative years were during the First World War; he cut his literary teeth during the depression and was already a famous writer when he entered the Second World War as a US Marine. Steinbeck’s texts—grounded in the United States’ socio-political paradigms—thus reflect a world where precarity is normative. He asks questions of justice and problematizes the American Dream in this era where such answers were far from settled. Written analysis of literary works will be required. Students will be provided with opportunities to practice critical interpretation. The course will examine a range of contemporary authors that intersect with Steinbeck’s oeuvre via selections of his major novels, short stories, essays, and letters, all of which will be discussed and supplemented with Steinbeck scholarship. The contemporary authors included in this course are Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, Langston Hughes, Sherwood Anderson, Zora Hurston Neal, Hart Crane, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), T.S. Eliot, Dawn Powell, Toni Morrison and Jack Kerouac. |