English 130D

Other Readings and Media

Larsen, N.: Quicksand and Passing; Norris, F.:  McTeague; Wharton, E.:  The Age of Innocence; Eliot, T. S.:  The Waste Land; Hemingway, E.: The Sun Also Rises; Fitzgerald, F. S.: The Great Gatsby; Cather, W.:  The Professor's House; Faulkner, W.: As I Lay Dying; West, N.: Miss Lonleyhearts and Day of the Locust; Wright, R.:  Native Son

Description

A survey of American literature 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 particular influence of modernism and other experimental modes on writing of 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; “high” modernism and popular culture; class and cosmopolitanism; and the literary response to new mediums of information and entertainment.