ENG 320 Studies in Literary Modes |
This course explores the literature and culture of the United States in the early part of the 20th century, with its overlapping milieu of high modernists, Harlem Renaissance writers, young bohemians, and political radicals. We will examine the profound redefinitions of the self catalyzed by the rise of psychology, rapid urbanization and mechanization, and the Great War, and we’ll discuss the public’s response to the varied artistic movements of the period, from Primitivism’s allure to the impersonal promise of Futurism. From painting to film, from Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives to Langston Hughes’s poetry and Meridel Le Sueur’s reportage, this course will examine a variety of texts that contributed to the literary experimentation and extraordinary achievement of the period. Other readings may include but are not limited to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Nella Larsen’s Passing, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and poetry by Williams, Taggard, Stevens, Frost, Cummings, Moore, and Millay.