Czech students studying American literature and culture this fall may notice new lessons they can really relate to: Lessons that use jazz, Pop Art and great novelists as examples. What they probably won't notice is that their textbook has the weight of the United States government behind it.

The U.S. Embassy in Prague is backing, and helping to distribute, a 170-page course book in 20th century American literature and culture published this summer by Leda, a Czech publisher. The book is aimed at secondary school and entry-level university students.

Titled Open Gates, the text covers the entirety of the 20th century, distilling the major works of 53 American novelists, short-story writers, poets and playwrights while placing their work within the context of other artistic forms: film, music and painting.

A passage from Saul Bellow's 1956 novel Sieze the Day finds itself grouped with a Mark Rothko painting; a playful Alexander Calder painting is sandwiched between excerpts from William Saroyan and Truman Capote.

"I was trying to use all the methods normally used for teaching language, but in a fresh way, to adapt them to literature," says Michaela Canková, a Czech teacher, who authored the book.

She adds that Czech teachers have traditionally taught literature more by telling students what they should think about certain books than by asking them to interact with a particular work. Her book tries to change this, she says.

Also included are the usual literary heavyweights — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Salinger. But the text also gives a nod to more eclectic and modern choices: Maxine Hong Kingston, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sherman Alexie.

Canková, who first wrote a textbook in 1997 called Open Channels, a compendium of 20th century British literature and culture, has worked with the embassy before, and began work on Open Gates soon after the British version. It took her three years to select the writers for the book, and she tested many of the book's lessons out on her own students beforehand, she says.

The basic formula for Open Gates is similar to its British predecessor. More than a simple decade-by-decade breakdown of writers and cultural milestones, the book consists of 15 chapters that focus more on themes than chronology.

The textbook begins by tackling a few basic questions: What is American culture, and where did it come from?

Writers and their work do not make an appearance until the second and third chapters, with the likes of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, both active during the first time period with which the book is concerned: the 1920s. But far from only limiting a discussion of the decade to the writers active during that time, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and James Agee's A Death in the Family are singled out for being influenced by that period (though the two were written in 1975 and 1957, respectively).

The book moves through the century, touching decades but also cultural movements: the rise of Jewish artists and novelists (Roth, Rothko, Bellow, Malamund), the African American experience in fiction (thanks to Hughes, Ellison and Morrison) and the recent new voices of Hispanic- and Asian-American writers (Kingston, Cisneros, Lahiri).

Students are asked questions based on passages, to test comprehension. They're asked to interpret the various works of art — Cubist, Surrealist, Post-Modernist — that break up the sections on writers. Slang and other colorful vocabulary are often highlighted and defined in boxes.

U.S. officials became aware of the project two years ago and have been working with Leda, the publisher, ever since. The embassy provided 30,000 Kc (almost $1,300) toward the book's publication, and held a book launch in June. Two thousand copies were printed.

The embassy also works to promote the book to various English language teaching outlets — notably its Fulbright high school teacher exchange — and Czech schools.

U.S. officials don't rule out future publications, such as a book focusing on American history, and say they might play a role in promoting Open Gates to American embassies throughout the region since the book is written entirely in English and, they say, could be effective anywhere.

"We support the teaching of American values, culture and politics. It's what we're here for," says Jan Krc, a spokesman for the embassy. "One of our long-term goals here is supporting American studies. Anything to support this fledgling discipline would certainly interest us."

The idea of American studies in Czech schools was unheard of during communist times, for obvious reasons. Aside from some American literature, students behind the Iron Curtain remained relatively ignorant of U.S. culture: its films, its theater, its art. That all changed in 1989, and since then the Czech Republic, along with the rest of the former Eastern bloc, has been catching up.

American studies, meanwhile, remains as popular as ever among Czech students.

"I don't know many [students] who would try to avoid it," says Josef Jarab, an American literature professor at Palacky´ University in Olomouc, central Moravia. "It's good to introduce students to the larger scope" of American culture.

But Jarab, former president of the European Association for American Studies, says it's important for Czechs to approach the discipline from a European, not American, perspective.