Recommended literature
Primary sources:
1. James Fenimore Cooper - The Last of the Mohicans /or The Pioneers, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer/
2. Edgar Allan Poe - The Raven
3. Edgar Allan Poe - Stories
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
5. Herman Melville - free choice (Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Bartleby, the
Scrivener...)
6. Henry David Thoreau - Walden
7. Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
8. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
9. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
10. Henry James - free choice (Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a
Lady, What Maisie Knew etc.)
11. Stephen Crane - Maggie, A Girl of the Streets
or Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence
12. Theodore Dreiser - An American Tragedy or Sister Carrie
13. Edgar Lee Masters - Spoonriver Anthology
14. Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
15. Sinclair Lewis - Babbitt
16. Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta)
17. Francis Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
18. John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
19. William Faulkner - free choice
20. Carson McCullers - The Member of the Wedding
or The Ballad of the Sad Café‚
21. Robert Frost - North of Boston
(or Carl Sandburg, T.S.Eliot, E. Pound, R. Jeffers...)
22. Langston Hughes - poetry
or Černý majestát - antologie
23. Eugene O'Neill - play (free choice)
24. Norman Mailer - The Naked and the Dead
25. Joseph Heller - Catch-22
26. Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
or James Baldwin - Go Tell It on the Mountain
or Toni Morrison – Beloved (Jazz, The Bluest Eye)
27. Masky a tváře černé Ameriky - antologie (ed. Josef Jařab)
28. Bernard Malamud - The Assistant
29. Saul Bellow – free choice
or Isaac B. Singer - free choice
or Philip Roth – free choice
30. Leslie Marmon Silko - Ceremony
(or a novel by N. Scott Momaday or Maxine Hong Kingston or John Okada)
31. Horoskop orloje - antologie moder. amer. poezie
or Dítě na skleníku - antologie současné amer. poezie
or Obeznámeni s nocí - antologie moder. amer. poezie
32. Tennesse Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire
or Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
33. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
34. Truman Capote - In Cold Blood
or E. L. Doctorow - Ragtime
or Norman Mailer - free choice
35. John Updike - The Centaur (or Rabbit Run)
36. William Styron – Sophie’s Choice
37. Jack Kerouac - On the Road
38. Jerome David Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
+ the other titles (Cheever, Barth, Pynchon, Oates, Brautigan, Carver...)
Topics for the exam in American literature
1. Literature of the Colonial Period - the Puritan Imagination
2. The Revolutionary Period - Political Imagination
3. American Romanticism - the First Harvest
4. The Flowering of New England (American Renaissance)
5. Herman Melville and the Prose of His Time
6. Walt Whitman and the Other Poets of the 19th Century
7. Mark Twain, the Triumph of Western Comic Realism; the
Regional Realists
8. Realism in American Prose
9. The American Version of Naturalism
10. The Attack on Convention in American Literature (Mencken,
Masters, Anderson, Lewis)
11. The Writers of the Lost Generation and Their Descendants
(the Authors of Social Protest - J. Steinbeck)
12. The Secret of the South - William Faulkner and the Southern
Writers of His Time
13. The Secret of the South - the Southern Writers after World
War II
14. Modern American Poetry (1900 - 1945), American Modernism
15. The Development of African-American Literature, Harlem
Renaissance, the Authors of Racial Protest
16. American Theatre in the Age of Eugene O'Neill
17. The American War Novel after World War I and World War II
18. Post-War African-American Literature - the Struggle of
Black Writers for Human and Civil Rights
19. Jewish-American Literature
20. "Other" American Literatures
21. Basic Tendencies in Post-War Poetry
22. American Theatre since 1945 - 2 Streams in American Drama
23. Satire and the Literature of Absurdity; American Postmodernism
24. The Imagination of Fact - Blending of Fiction and Non-Fiction
in Contemporary American Prose
25. The Main Representatives of Realism and the Other Literary
Movements in American Prose after World War II
Doc. PhDr. Stanislav Kolář, Ph.D.