American Writers II

Catalog description

This course surveys US literature from Reconstruction to the present. Students will learn how literary writing enables us to thrive and survive in the world by exploring novels and short stories by Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison, among others. Lecture and discussion will teach students how to read literature and life in detail and in context. This interpretive work will reveal how literature responds to pivotal events in American social history and contributes to artistic movements such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism.