Graduate Courses - ENG 546: Modern American Literature
Prerequisites: Graduate standing in English or permission of instructor.
Recent offerings:
Spring 2010, Kress
This course will examine the experiments of modernism in American literature by exploring the work of both well- and lesser-known novelists and poets. The widely varying approaches to writing exhibited by the writers on our list consternate the very term modernism, so one of the central concerns of the course will be the search for abutments and abysses among the authors. Which approaches to writing bind them to each other and so help to define an overall sense of American modernism? Which aspects separate these authors from each other and so help…to define an overall sense of American modernism?
Possible Texts (The reading list is still partially in a state of flux, but ten of the following authors/texts will make the final cut):
- Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises or collected short fictions
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury
- Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts
- Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed
- Felipe Alfau, Locos or Chromos
- Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems
- Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight or The Shy Pornographer
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
- Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
- John Dos Passos, USA—the whole thing!
- William March, Company K
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
- Anais Nin, Henry and June
- William Carlos Williams, Paterson
- Thomas Pynchon, V.
As the first gasp of American modernism, I imagine that Stein definitely will be on the list; similarly, as the last gasp, V. will also make the cut. Beyond that, I am open to suggestions from students interested in the course, so please pipe up if you have preferences from the above selections.
Spring 2008, Moxley
The rhetoric of Modernist aesthetics was highly gendered—toward a powerful and clarifying masculinity, away from an ineffectual and mystificatory femininity. But is it that simple? In this seminar we will examine ideas of generation and birth in the modernist response to late Victorian anxieties over degeneration and death. Because generation is intimately tied to reproduction and race, we will also study modernist-period (1900-1939) ideas about femininity, masculinity, sexuality, birth control, abortion, and eugenics. We will read major literary works of the time, examining how such works reflect, engage, contribute to, complicate, and/or resist these ideas. Authors will most likely include: Freud, Goldman, Sanger, Eliot, Barnes, James, Hemingway, Cather, Moore, Pound, Stein, and others.
Can be taken for the concentration in Gender and Literature.