Course No: 350:654
Index #: 19055
Distribution Requirement: A5, D
Wednesdays - 12:10 pm
MU 207
Literary Modernity in the US
Andrew Goldstone
This course is a US-focused case study in modernism in the context of the broader transformation of print and literacy in the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time an American-dominated modernism was thought to cover nearly everything of interest in (early) twentieth-century literature, but scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the limitations of this approach, which ignores or devalues a wide range of literary production that does not resemble classic modernism. In order to grasp the effects of the structural transformations that affected reading and writing broadly in the period, this course proposes that modernism and its many non-modernist others are best studied as joint products of an expanding, fragmenting, and polarizing literary field. To give our inquiry some heuristic limits, we accept a US national frame, bearing in mind as we read individual writers that really, universally, literary relations stop nowhere. The course is divided into two parts. The first half of the course gives a selective overview of American modernism up to 1940. The second half of the course is a series of rapid introductions to a few key US literary tendencies contemporary with but distinct from modernism: the Harlem Renaissance, proletarian literature, and several genres of commercial fiction. Needless to say we cannot cover the field in its totality, but our goal is to articulate some of the themes, transformations, and interpretive problems that an expansive literary history of the twentieth century encounters.
Readings include both primary texts and scholarship throughout the semester. The primary texts are to be studied with particular attention to the era’s distinctive print media (little magazines, pulps and slicks, experimental anthologies, and so on). The selection of secondary readings gives rather short shrift to classic modernist scholarship in order to emphasize more recent approaches to the broader field.
The major assignment is a research paper (8000–12000 words). Some work in progress will be due at the end of March. In addition, in every seminar at least one student will present on a secondary reading and lead initial discussion on it.
Works studied may include:
- Crane, "The Open Boat"
- James, The Ambassadors
- Hemingway, In Our Time (selections)
- Porter, Flowering Judas (selections)
- Eliot, The Waste Land
- Stevens, Harmonium (selections)
- Moore, Observations (selections)
- Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
- Barnes, Nightwood
- Locke, ed. The New Negro (selections)
- Hughes, A New Song (selections)
- Le Sueur, "I Was Marching"
- Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Loos, Gentleman Prefer Blondes
- Pulp magazine stories by: Gardner, Hammett, Lovecraft, C.L. Moore