Fall 2008 Courses

English 374-01: The American Novel: 20th-century American Modernism (Dawes)

M/W/F 1:10-2:10pm MAIN 010

This course will examine several landmark novels in the American literary canon, paying special attention to representations of power and powerlessness. We will examine these texts as aesthetic achievements with specific formal requirements, but we will also consider questions of cultural production and political consequence. How do codes of race, class, and gender function in these texts? How do social systems (employment structures, language, the family) detract from or contribute to the promotion of human dignity? How are power relations in society reproduced in relations between author and text, or text and reader? How is the reader changed by the act of reading? Is art beyond politics and moral judgement? Or is art a form of politics? Texts will be drawn from the literature of modernism (Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time, William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night), its antecedents (Henry James, The Bostonians, Edith Wharton, House of Mirth, Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), and its legacy (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, and Toni Morrison, Beloved).

*First day attendance required.*

Fall 2008 Course Listings