Okay, /lit/, let's say you're designing a university

>>8822243
Let's see your list, anon.

I guess I'd use a three-class system. And, of course, you need some context from non-American writers and settings.

Middlemarch - Elliot
You Can't Go Home Again - Thomas Wolfe

Dubliners - James Joyce
Iliad - Homer
As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Yearling - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
Uncle Remus series - Joel Chandler Harris

>>8822281
>And, of course, you need some context from non-American writers and settings.

Say more?

Like with Dubliners for example. Is your thinking that because Joyce always wanted to show the universal in the local and particular that the the experiences of the characters in Dublin are also by extension the experiences of any number of people in America too?
Are you alluding to Irish-American immigrants?

>>8822298
Yeah, exactly

>>8822231
>no Walt Whitman
>no Ralph Waldo Emerson
>no Henry David Thoreau
>no Emily Dickinson
>no Edgar Allan Poe
>no William Carlos Williams
>no Allen Ginsberg

>>8822281
Don't try to fill an American fiction course with non-American writers. I don't care what your justification is, just stop it.

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J R
The Recognitions
moby dick
any carver
mason and dixon
the atrocity exhibition
the rainbow stories
east of eden
libra
angle of repose

it's really fucking hard man. just 10 is so hard. a lot of great authors left out. I'm a shitty Canuck and I love the Pomo Americans. good stuff. but that's the most American shit I read.

>>8822327
Dude! Come on.

>>8822328
replace Atrocity Exhibition with Naked Lunch

>>8822346
sure. but I fucking hated that book. but that makes sense on list..gg


nigger

>>8822352
>hating Naked Lunch but liking Atrocity Exhibition
how the fuck does that work

Day of the Triffids. - Wynham
Less than Zero- BEE
Gravity's Rainbow- the Pynch
Atlas Shrugged- Rand
Cannery Row- Steinbeck
Blood Meridian - Mccarthy
The Quiet American, Greene
Bear- Engles
Neuromancer- Gibson
The Great Gatsby- FSF
Farewell to Arms - Ernie Hemhem.
The Times They Are A-Changin'- Dylan

>>8822231
Get rid of:
Reservation Blues - Sherman Alexie
The Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon

Add:
Willa Cather
Toni Morrison
Moby Dick
Poe
maybe Hunter Thompson?

>>8822358
naked lunch was just so gay

>>8822281
oh.
fuck you.

>>8822360
The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged would be great, how much fun would that be to teach.

I feel like you need On The Road in there. Its the beat bible.

>>8822372
On The Road is America in book form

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Huckleberry Finn yet. That one's a must.

I'd also put Native Son in the running.

>>8822320
>meme'd an RWE essay into a career
>only wrote one good essay
>unessential
>good point here
>le spooky sound in the night man
>zzzzzzzzzzz
>le drugs are cool man

>>8822572
Huckleberry Finn? More like Cuckleberry Finn.

>>8822231

I'd let the students chose their own reading list because that's what being an American is truly about.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
USA trilogy by John Dos Passos
Paterson by William Carlos Williams
The Ways of White Folks - Langston Hughes
Go Down, Moses - William Faulkner
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison.

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>>8822231
Short works by Irving and Poe
Selections from Emerson and Thoreau
Moby-Dick
Huck Finn
The Sun Also Rises
East of Eden
Invisible Man
The Crying of Lot 49
Gilead

I've actually been meditating on this for a while. I haven't read any of the lesser-known or minor early writers, but I think I can offer my two cents:

(as a special side-note: it's interesting to me personally that the first long-form narratives of note in both the US and Mexico were picaresque quixotisms)

Tocqueville—I only include him because he saw the nation at its outset and you could probably include some short quotes about the uniqueness of American life in the introductory session of the course. Include something about St John Crèvecoeur and maybe something about the American character from the founding fathers.

From there it becomes standard stuff
Hawthorne—Wakefield, Minister's Black Veil, Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini's Daughter plus more.
Melville—Bartleby, Benito, Encantatas, selections from MD (I don't trust today's undergrads with the big D, just sayin'); also, Melville's poetry is seriously underappreciated.
Whitman—standards, although I would put special emphasis on the marked differences between the original LoG and the expanded, overburdened and ultimately unfinished version.
Dickinson—anything, really. You guys should READ Dickinson.
Poe—standards, emphasis on Tales of Ratiocination.
(really, you can't go wrong with any of the more recognizable titles in their catalogs)

>>8823020
>Hawthorne
Also, Earth's Holocaust* and The Ambitious Guest
>Poe
I think I'd add an option for an essay on the novella, with Billy Bud and Arthur Gordon Pym as options*
Twain—Jumping Frog, A Curious Dream, Some Learned Fables..., A Curious Experience, The Diary of Adam and Eve, The £1M Bank-Note, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and The Mysterious Stranger (*also these two).
Seriously, Twain NEEDS to be read more widely. Goddam...
Faulkner—Barn Burning, A Rose for Emily, Dry September, That Evening Sun, Red Leaves, Lo!, All the Dead Pilots, A Justice, The Bear*
Dos Passos—The Manhattan Transfer, nuff said.
Anderson—as much as I like Winesburg, Ohio, it's not gonna fly with everyone. Just a few select stories from this, as well as A Death in the Woods.
O'Connor—The Displaced Person, Everything That Rises..., Greenleaf and Judgment Day are absolutely necessary.
Fitzgerald—Bernice, May Day, Diamond as Big, Babylon Revisited and Crazy Sunday.

I'm missing someone, but I can't remember who...

>>8822281
>first letter of every line

>>8822679
do you actually think these things? or were you just responding to the fact that his objection was presented in the most abrasive format possible (namely greentext)?

>>8823183

good eye

>>8822328
are/is the rainbow stories really good? Been meaning to read it. It'll be my intro to him

>>8822361
OP here.

Why Moby Dick? Why Poe? I said the course is called "The American Experience in Fiction". It's not "A Survey of Great American Writers"

Melville is certainly one of the greatest American writers and Moby Dick is one of the greatest novels of all time, but does Moby Dick really capture the "American Experience?" It was written by an American, and of course its themes are universal, but does Moby Dick really and immediately capture life in America? I don't really think so.

Poe's specialty was horror/suspense. I don't see a lot of "the American Experience" in Poe.

>>8822320
OP here again.

None of these individuals except Poe wrote fiction (and I explained in my previous post why I wouldn't include Poe). The hypothetical class is called "The American Experience in Fiction."

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>>8822231

Basic Mathematics, Serge Lang
An Introduction to Mathematics, Alfred North Whitehead
Precalculus, Sullivan
Calculus, Gilbert Strang
Differential Equations and Linear Algebra, Gilbert Strang
Introductory Physics 1-3, Robert Brown
An Introduction to Formal Logic, Tim Button
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Bertrand Russell

>>8824752
pure autism

>>8824752
>BAAPCDIAI
What's that supposed to mean?

>>8823230
yeah I liked it. very American. but the fucked up drug addicts and street scum is only one side of vollmann. it doesn't represent everything he is.

>>8824752
These are all brits you tool.

>>8824800
Actually they aren't.

I should have done that though. Would have added an additional layer of trolling.