20th Century American Literature ((3 Credits))

Catalog description

"Twentieth-century American Literature" encompasses an extraordinarily diverse range of texts, and there are many ways in which its history could be traced and constructed. This course offers one particular route through this vibrant and divergent literary field. We will examine a range of American literature written between the end of the First World War and the dawning of the 21st century. We will look at some major American writers -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and others -- but also consider the evolving path of American literary history in the twentieth century, its relationship to the social upheavals of the times as well as to the aesthetic and generic development of American art and writing. We'll look at novels, short stories, and journalism, and consider the changing fate of these forms in the age of modernism and post-modernism. Some of the fundamental issues of twentieth-century American life (wars in Europe and Vietnam, the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, the triumph of late capitalism, urbanism and its discontents, religion and secularism, etc.) will be explored alongside a wide variety of literary forms and styles: from the modernist novella and the postwar realist novel, through the experimentalism of Native American writing and New Journalism, to genre fiction, theater, and the graphic novel.