American Literature After 1900
Penn State is the historic home of American literature in higher education; in the early twentieth century, Fred Lewis Pattee became the first English professor in the country to teach classes exclusively devoted to US literary works. The Americanist faculty at Penn State aim to be similarly ground-breaking.
Recent Grad Courses
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Center for American Literary Studies
The Penn State Center for American Literary Studies, dedicated to supporting the study, teaching, and reading of American literatures, is quickly becoming a leading national center; it offers exceptional research and fellowship opportunities for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. CALS sponsored and hosted the inaugural conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, for example. Visit the CALS website at www.cals.psu.edu.
People specializing in this area
Tenure-Line Faculty
Kevin Bell
New York University, Ph.D, Comparative Literature 2000
Trans-Atlantic literary modernisms; Black American literature, film and music; critical theory; experimental traditions in film.
Author of Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He is working now on an interpretive study entitled Drift Velocities: the Aesthetic Curve of Radical Black Film and Literature.
Richard Matthew Doyle
Burroughs! Philip K. Dick! These writers form a dyad with which one can inquire into the cultural conditions of the emergence of information technologies and their influences on planetary culture and their ecosystems, including consciousness. Burroughs' "Language is a virus from outer space" predates scientist Richard Dawkins' concept of the "meme", and brings the non conscious agenda of information technologies to the fore. Dick's first person encounter with being "nailed by information" in 1974 was the subject of his massive text, The Exegesis, which I helped compile into a redacted print volume with PSU undergraduates and Editors Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. I had the chutzpah to write (an admittedly shortened) Afterword. "Stairway to Eleusis", to the lengthy text that you can find online. The entire digital form of the Exegesis, with some lacunae, can be found at zebrapedia.psu.edu/. Check it out!
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Benjamin Schreier
- Post-1900 American literature and culture; Jewish American literature and culture; Ethnic literature; Intellectuals and culture; Narrative nonfiction; Literary history
Linda Furgerson Selzer, Ph.D.
Matt Tierney
Graduate Students
Jace Gatzemeyer
The American modernist novel