State of the Union at the University of Limmerick

The syllabus for a third-year course (EH4016) on “State of the Union: American Literature since 1890” being taught at the University of Limmerick (Ireland) requires students to read five novels. One of them is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. The others are Don DeLillo’s White Noise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and  John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. No Hemingway and Faulkner, you may ask? Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” did make the syllabus, as did Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” along with short stories from James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver, and poems from Allen Ginsberg and Harlem Renaissance poets.