350:584

Index # - 72873

Distribution Requirement:  A5, D

Monday – 1:10 p.m.

MU 002

Marianne DeKoven

American Modernism

American modernism is often taken to be less cosmopolitan than its British and Continental counterparts—more bound up in American traditions of naturalism, regionalism, local color, and eccentric, isolated individualism.  We have Robert Frost in the New England woods, Wallace Stevens in his Hartford insurance company office, William Carlos Williams in his New Jersey medical practice, Marianne Moore, the avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan, in her tricornered hat.  We have Faulkner in his imagined Yoknapatawpha, based on real back-country, small-town deep South Mississippi, Cather on her frontier Nebraska prairie, Wharton in her hidebound upper class New York, even James, that most cosmopolitan of American modernists, often absorbed into British rather than American modernism. We have Hughes, McKay, Hurston, Fauset, Larsen, and the other Harlem Renaissance writers very much firmly located in Harlem.  Fitzgerald, although he followed the post-war siren song of Paris, sends the narrator of his greatest novel firmly back to the snows of the upper midwest.  Hemingway, though he traveled the world and set his fiction in the places he traveled to, somehow, in the minds of many, is really located in the Michigan woods of his early stories.

But then what do we do with Gertrude Stein?  With H.D.?  With, for that matter, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound?  We call them expatriates and make a special category for them; we sometimes yield them up, like James, to British or Continental modernism. 

This course will push against that narrative, working within the larger framework of international, cosmopolitan, transatlantic, diasporic modernisms, at the same time that it acknowledges the peculiarities, eccentricities, localisms and defiant individuality of many of its writers.  As is clear in the first paragraph of this course description, we will study the most important writers of American modernism, from the turn of the century through the 1930’s.  We will read them in relation to the history of that period, and also in relation to issues of geographical location, race, gender, sexuality, class.  At the same time, we will be thinking about what modernism was, both in general and in its particular American incarnation.