This course will focus on the period between the world wars, from 1918 through the decades of the 1920's and 1930's.
The literature of this period was marked both by modernist aesthetics and by dramatic social changes in the social fabric caused by reaction to the mass immigration at the beginning of the century and mass migration of African Americans to the North. It also saw the emergence of new voices in literature in terms of region, race, and ethnicity. We will look at the historical, sociological, and political factors that shaped the cultural production of this rich period, including nativism, blackface minstrelsy, dialect, and urbanism. We will discuss the works in the context of modernism as an artistic movement, including formal experimentation in narrative technique and characterization. Among the issues that will be addressed are plots of cross-cultural encounter, inscriptions of the “Other,” the construction of national identity, symbolic geography (such as the frontier, Europe, the urban underground, the South) and the ideological aspects of the representation of race, ethnicity, and gender.

Primary Works (not final):

Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1932)
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934)

Critical Works (not final)

Walter Benn Michaels, "The Vanishing American"
Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood"
Horace Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot"
Werner Sollors, excerpts from Beyond Ethnicity and Neither Black Nor White Yet
Both
Eric Sundquist, excerpt from To Wake the Nations
Hana Wirth-Nesher, excerpt from Call It English