Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Study of selected works of American literature. May survey a particular era or topic, may draw on transnational or hemispheric perspectives, and may be organized by any number of critical approaches including race, Indigeneity, sexuality, gender, historicism, class, or ecocriticism. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

American Literature of 1925

From the Scopes Monkey Trial to the founding of the New Yorker magazine, a lot was going on in the 1925 United States.  Then as now, Americans worried about unbridled capitalism betraying the nation’s ideals.  Then as now, abortion was illegal in many states, a situation that fell hardest on poor women.  Then as now, people marveled at the contrast between the centrality of African Americans to American culture and their abuse within it.  And for these and a concatenation of other reasons, 1925 became what’s now almost universally considered the greatest year in American literary history.  An older generation of writers—Theodore Dreiser, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather, all born in the early 1870s—produced their masterpieces.  At the other end of the spectrum, Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology, dedicated to “THE YOUNGER GENERATION,” instantly became what Arnold Rampersad has called “the Bible” of the Harlem Renaissance.  Many in the so-called Lost Generation of talented modernists, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, published their first—and in too many instances their best—books.  The distinction between “popular” and “highbrow” literature we associate with the rise of modernism had not, in reality, gelled yet; Anita Loos’ brilliant, bestselling, and darkly hilarious Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was admired, with good reason, by the likes of James Joyce and William Faulkner.

This course, then, will operate partly as a focused introduction to the crucial and messy transition in American literature from naturalism and realism to modernism.  Because of the extremely narrow historical scope, we’ll also have unusual opportunity to focus on historical context (especially in politics, economics, and the other arts) and the weird question of a literary “period.”  These books more than repay close reading, and we’ll do a lot of that as well.

 

 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Students will write better.
Students will read better.
Students will develop a familiarity with “period” definitions of realism, naturalism, and modernism, as well as the problems with such periodization.
Students will better understand an American world that looks eerily like today’s, but without even a rudimentary social safety net.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: