Writers, Gangsters, and Flappers: 1920s America

Catalog description

This course studies the cultural, intellectual, social, and political life of Americans from the end of the First World War to the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Major subjects include: issues of race and gender, particularly the feminine image in the 1920s (“flapper”); criminals, criminality, and images of criminality (“gangsters”); art and the politics of artistic representation, specifically in literature (“writers”); and cultural clashes, especially those between “fundamentalism” and “science,” and progress and reaction.