English 130D

Book List

Cather, Willa: The Professor's House; Faulkner, William: Light in August; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby; Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises; Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence; Wright, Richard: Native Son

Description

 A survey of American texts tracing the literary response to the emerging shape of modern life in the first decades of the twentieth century. We will read across a range of genres and styles to assess the influence of modernism and other experimental modes in writing of the period, while also exploring the significance that realism and naturalism continued to hold for many U. S. authors. We will be specifically concerned with how writers addressed such topics as national identity and racial difference; new psychologies of consciousness, emotion, and sexuality; elite forms and popular culture; class and cosmopolitanism; the significance of film and other media technologies.