Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The intensive study of selected works of American literature written since 1900. May be organized by author, genre, or critical approach. Students with credit for ENGL 449 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Cather and Faulkner: Regionalism, Nationalism, Modernism
A generation apart, marked by wildly contrasting styles, and concerned with very different regions of the U.S., Willa Cather and William Faulkner nevertheless share a number of concerns (or, as we like to say now, “anxieties”) about national identity, race, settler colonialism, gender, history, and art—concerns not irrelevant to contemporary Canada.  Perhaps more importantly, our subject matter happens to be unflaggingly brilliant fiction that demands and repays close reading.  In so reading it, we will go to some very dark places and some very beautiful ones.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Students will write better.
Students will read better.
Students will understand the major formal and thematic issues in Cather and Faulkner as scholars presently understand them.
Students will develop some familiarity with American national and regional mythologies, specifically of "the West"/the frontier and "the South," and mythologies surrounding settler colonialism, race, and immigration, and be able to apply what they learn to the contemporary U.S. and Canadian situations.
By studying texts from 1918 through 1942, students will develop a sense of the trajectory and aims of American high modernist fiction, especially its formal affinities with contemporaneous experiments in music and the visual arts.
Students will understand the case for why Absalom, Absalom! is the Best Novel Ever.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: