English 130D

American Literature: 1900-1945

Book List

Cather, Willa: My Antonia; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Fitzgerald, F.: The Great Gatsby; Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises; Johnson, James: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; Larsen, Nella: Passing; Locke, Alain: New Negro; McCullers, Carson: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence; Wright, Richard: Native Son

Description

This course will introduce students to American literature of the early to mid-twentieth century. Reading across a range of genres and styles, we will ask how developments in literary form meditate on and respond to the social, technological, intellectual, and political conditions of modernity in the United States. We will pay particular attention to questions of national identity and racial difference; “high” modernism and popular culture; new psychologies of consciousness, emotion, and sexuality; the emergence of new media and the persistence of Jim Crow; and the global contexts of U.S. imperialism.

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