Read Along with Berkeley English

This semester, we'll be reading along with Professor Andrew Way Leong's survey course American Literature, 1900-1945: Class, Race, Critique, Rewound. With three sessions on the work of Carlos Bulosan, Zora Neale Hurston and the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, we're so excited for this series! As Professor Leong's course description tells us, "This course is a retrospective or "rewound" survey of American literature and criticism from around 1945 to 1900. We'll begin in the 1940s, working our way back in time, not only through key works in prose and poetry, but also through contemporaneous works of literary and cultural criticism. Although "theory" and "literature" are often presented in isolation from each other, the early 20th century provides excellent opportunities for understanding how critical practices and ideas we might take for granted today (e.g., close reading, critique, or sociological analyses of race and class) emerged in dialogue with the production of American literature. For the 1940s and early Cold War, we'll look at how the "close reading" techniques developed by New Critics centered in the American South were exported to the Philippines, and how these techniques might be read in tandem and opposition to Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (1946)."