Topics in American Literature II: Modernisms in America

3 units

This course offers an advanced introduction to both the literature and the concept of modernism, the ism used to mark the experimental verve of early twentieth-century writing and to grasp its ties to modernity, or the modern social world. As the course title suggests, we will devote most of our time to the career of modernism in the United States, a place imagined as both the modernist nation par excellence and the desert modernism escaped to be born. Three groups of primary texts--early modernist experiments, 1920s modernist landmarks, and Great Depression revisions--will illuminate the grand ambitions of eccentric literary forms and sequestered avant-garde movements; the public disputes and buried alliances between high expatriate and Harlem Renaissance modernisms; and the influential Depression-era reinterpretation of modernism as reactionary self-indulgence. The syllabus will feature fiction, poetry, and drama by old and new literary celebrities: Djuna Barnes, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Meridel LeSueur, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright. A shorter list of critical essays will highlight modernism's tendency to theorize itself while introducing 21st-century perspectives from the New Modernist Studies. Satisfies the American requirement. For undergraduates, Junior or Senior standing is required.