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[Fall 2003]
ENGL W4604 American Modernism
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| Prof.
Rachel Adams |
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| DESCRIPTION
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This course approaches modernism less as
a movement or a set of specific aesthetic qualities than
as a rather disparate series of response to the historical,
technological, intellectual, and political conditions
of modernity in the United States. Spanning the period
from the turn of the century to the 1950s, our reading
will help us to consider the relationship between key
events (U.S. imperialism, immigration, World Wars, the
Jazz age, the Great Depression); intellectual and scientific
developments (the theory of relativity, the popularization
of Freudian psychoanalysis, the anthropological concept
of culture, the spread of consumer culture, Fordism, the
automobile, the birth of cinema, the skyscraper); and
cultural production.
Assigned readings will include novels, short stories,
and contemporary essays. Some selections are written by
authors explicitly dedicated to the modernist imperative
to "make it new," whereas others engage with
their cultural context in less self-conscious ways. Since
visual culture plays an important role in our investigation
of this period, we will also watch slides and screen several
films during the course of the semester. Class meetings
will combine lecture and discussion formats. Your participation
is encouraged.
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| ASSIGNMENTS
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In order to complete the course successfully,
you are required to pass a midterm (10%) and a final quiz
(15%), write one short paper (4-5 pages, 25%), and one
longer term paper (7-10 pages, 50%). The first paper is
a close reading exercise intended to allow you to work
extensively with one poem or significant passage from
our readings, applying concepts and methods modeled in
class. The term paper will give you the opportunity to
explore course material in greater detail, drawing comparisons
between visual and literary texts. All written work must
be submitted on time: late papers will be marked down
by 1/3 of a grade for each day after the deadline listed
on the syllabus. If you are unable to attend lecture,
you are responsible for the material covered on that day
and should contact a classmate for notes. Although I welcome
your questions and feedback, do not come to office hours
to request a personal recap of a lecture you were unable
to attend.
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| GRADUATE/HONORS READING
GROUP |
All graduate students and selected undergraduates
are invited to participate in the Graduate/Honors Reading
Group. We will meet every other week (dates and times
TBA) to discuss a series of critical works on American
modernism. Members of the reading group are not required
to take the midterm and final quiz. Interested students
should attend the organizational meeting, date and time
will be announced at the first lecture.
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| REQUIRED TEXTS
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James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Willa Cather, My Antonia
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Anzia Yezierska, The Breadgivers
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
Course reader
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| RECOMMENDED TEXTS/READING
GROUP SELECTIONS |
— Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid
Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
— Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter
of American Literature
— Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring
of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
— Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity,
Technology, and African American Culture Between the World
Wars
— Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan
in the 1920s
— Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism
and the Concept of Culture
— Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and
the Twentieth-Century American Novel
— Walter Kaleijian, American Culture Between the
Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique
— Mark McGurl, Novel Art: Elevations of American
Fiction after Henry James
— Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature
and the Invention of the Welfare State
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STUDENT RECOMMENDED LINKS: RESOURCES
ON AMERICAN MODERNISM
Today in Literature
Voice of the Shuttle
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SYLLABUS
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| Session 1: |
Introduction: What is Modernism?
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| Session 2: |
NEW ARRIVALS TO THE AMERICAN SCENE
Required Readings:
Horace Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot"
Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America"
Anzia Yezierska, The Breadgivers to p. 151
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| Session 3: |
NEW ARRIVALS TO THE AMERICAN SCENE: Part
II
Required Readings:
Jacob Riis, "The Jews of New York"
Abraham Cahan "The Russian Jew in America"
The Breadgivers
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| Session 4: |
THE CITY, THE ASSEMBLY LINE, THE MACHINE
Required Readings:
Antonio Gramsci, "Americanism and Fordism,"
"Marinetti the Revolutionary," "Theatre
and Cinema"
Lewis Mumford, "Machinery and the Modern Style"
and "The City"
E.B. White, "Here is New York"
Hart Crane, "Chaplinesque," "To Brooklyn
Bridge" (Norton Anthology)
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| Session 5: |
THE CITY, THE ASSEMBLY LINE, THE MACHINE
Required Readings:
John Dos Passos, selections from The Big Money and 42nd
Parallel
"Chaplin: Modern Times"
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| Session 6: |
MODERNITY, VISUAL ARTS, LITERARY FORM
Required Readings:
Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to p.
85
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| Session 7: |
MODERNITY, VISUAL ARTS, LITERARY FORM
Required Readings:
Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Stein, from "Composition as Explanation"
Henri Bergson, from Creative Evolution
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| Session 8: |
MODERNIST POETICS
Required Readings:
T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"The Waste Land" (Norton)
"Marie Lloyd"
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| Session 9: |
MODERNIST POETICS
Required Readings:
F.S. Flint, "Imagisme"
Ezra Pound, "A Few Dont's by an Imagiste," "Vortex"
Norton Anthology, 374-409
H.D., Norton Anthology, 409-422
H.D., from "Notes on Thought and Vision"
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| Session 10: |
MODERNIST POETICS
Required Readings:
Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,"
"Anecdote of the Jar," "The Snow Man,"
"A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," "The
Emperor of Ice-cream," "The Idea of Order at
Key West," "Study of Two Pears," "The
Man on the Dump," "Of Modern Poetry," "The
Plain Sense of Things" (all in Norton Anthology)Stevens,
from "The Irrational Element in Poetry"
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| Session 11: |
MODERNIST POETICS
Required Readings:
William Carlos Williams, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime,"
"Spring and All," "The Red Wheelbarrow,"
"This Is Just to Say" (in Norton Anthology
Williams, from Prologue to Kora in Hell
Marianne Moore, Norton Anthology, 454-467
Moore, "New Poetry Since 1912"
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| Session 12: |
THE JAZZ AGE
Required Readings:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby chs. I-IV
Madison Grant, "Introduction," "Race and
Democracy," "The Competition of Races"
PAPER #1 DUE BY TOMORROW NOON
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| Session 13: |
THE JAZZ AGE
Required Reading:
The Great Gatsby
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| Session 14: |
MIDTERM
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| Session 15: |
GENDER AND FORMAL EXPERIMENTATION
Required Readings:
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood to p. 106
Barnes, "If Noise Were Forbidden at Coney Island,"
"How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed," "The
Girl and the Gorilla," and "My Sisters and I
at a New York Prizefight"
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| Session 16: |
GENDER AND FORMAL EXPERIMENTATION
Required Reading:
Nightwood
Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon, screening and discussion
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| Session 17: |
AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND ETHNOGRAPHY
Required Readings:
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God chs.
1-12
Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain"
Alain Locke, "The New Negro"
George Schuyler, "The Negro-Art Hokum"
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| Session 18: |
AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND ETHNOGRAPHY
Required Readings:
Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression"
Franz Boas, "Preface" to Of Mules and Men
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| Session 19: |
REGIONAL MODERNISM
Required Readings:
Willa Cather, My Antonia Books 1-2
S.S. McClure, "The Tammanyizing of a Civilization"
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| Session 20: |
REGIONAL MODERNISM
Required Readings:
My Antonia
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| Session 21: |
MEMORY, HISTORY, MODERNITY
Required Readings:
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom chs. 1-7 (finishing
the novel for today is recommended)
C. Vann Woodward, "The Historical Dimension"
and "The Burden for William Faulkner"
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| Session 22: |
MEMORY, HISTORY, MODERNITY
Required Reading:
Absalom, Absalom
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| Session 23: |
DOCUMENTARY REALISM
Required Readings:
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men pp. 1-118
Lionel Trilling, "Greatness with One Fault in It"
Dwight MacDonald, "James Agee"
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| Session 24: |
DOCUMENTARY REALISM
Required Readings:
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men pp. 197-252, 318-380
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| Session 25: |
MODERNISTS IN MEXICO
Required Readings:
Katherine Anne Porter, "María Concepción,"
"Virgin Violeta, " "The Martyr," "That
Tree," "Flowering Judas"
Porter, "Why I Write about Mexico," "The
Mexican Trinity," "La Conquistadora," "Quetzalcoatl,"
"The Charmed Life"
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| Session 26: |
What Was Modernism?
Slideshow: Postmodernism
PAPER #2 DUE BY TOMORROW NOON
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