Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism: The American Novel and its Traditions

Catalog description

This course charts the course of American novel from the Civil War to the present. We will attend to the development of a distinctly novelistic literary tradition in American writing over the period and to the interactions between this tradition of literary novel writing and the emergence commercial novelistic generic forms (ie. the detective novel, science fiction). We will also consider the novel’s relations to alternative literary modes (narrative history, the sketch, the short story, the occasional essay) and to alternative media (film, television, music). Melville, Twain, DuBois, James, Fitzgerald, Hammett, Hurston, Wright, Nabokov, Butler, Morrison, Dick, Didion.