English 609.38 American Modernism
Instructor: Michael Clarke
Course Description
This course offers a general survey of American modernism and the historical, political, and cultural contexts out of which it arose. It will acquaint students with some of the key modernist literary texts as well as some of the corresponding artistic developments in painting, cinema, photography, and architecture. Although we will focus on the period of high modernism (roughly 1913 to 1930), we will consider the ambivalent responses to modernism in Depression-era texts and postmodernist literature. The course will offer an overview of recent developments in modernist studies through selected excerpts from current scholarship in the field. Assignments will likely include a conference-length paper, a book review, and a presentation.
Readings (Tentative)
Selected poems by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer
Anzia Yezierska, The Breadgivers
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Nella Larsen, Passing
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
John Dos Passos, U.S.A.
Darcy McNickle, The Surrounded
Meridel LeSeuer, The Girl
Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times
Secondary Texts (excerpts from the following):
Kalaidjian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism (Cambridge 2005)
English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (North Carolina 2004)
Trask, Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought (Cornell 2003)
Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions & Literary Modernism (Routledge 2003)
Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (Routledge 2000)
Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Duke 2000)
Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso 1996)
Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Duke 1995)
North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-century Literature (Oxford 1994)
