World War I American Literature

Catalog description

Unlike the canonized European literature of World War I, the canonized American literature of this war was written entirely by men who were not combat soldiers. While this course looks at a few examples of that familiar literature (by Hemingway, Faulkner, and John Dos Passos), it focuses on the forgotten literature of World War I, much of which was written by combat soldiers and some of which was written by women; most of these texts were either popular or acclaimed in their own era. In this way, this course attempts to give an accurate sense of the American literary response to and depiction of the world's first large-scale mechanized war. And much of this literature, though reacting to and focused on the physical and psychological horrors of modern combat, was also reacting to and depicting the huge social shake-up involved in the American army's unprecedented if partial experiment in meritocracy, as the military mobilized, supervised, and assigned millions of men from all walks of American life to various positions and ranks. At least temporarily, the mobilization redefined masculinity, altered gender roles, and altered the status of men from minority groups and the working and lower classes, as well as women.