Spring 2008 Courses

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

T/TH 10:10-11:40am, Olin-Rice 370

This course will examine several landmark novels in American literary modernism. We will examine these texts as aesthetic achievements with specific formal requirements, but we will also consider questions of cultural production and political consequence. What conceptions of beauty underlie different narrative styles? How do authors use the experience of beauty (a phrase that jars the reader into seeing the world anew, a paragraph that has the delicate structure of a stanza) to develop the larger themes of the work as a whole? At the same time we will consider how codes of race, class, and gender function in these texts, paying particular attention to the way 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? The class will engage in intensive readings of individual texts, but will also seek to examine the larger backgrounds of American literary and cultural history. Authors of special attention may include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zora Neale Hurston.

*First day attendance required*

Spring 2008 Course Listings