This course surveys American literature from 1910 to about 1945. It concentrates
primarily on modernism of the 1910s and 1920s, but also surveys the social realism of the
1930s and samples a few war poems of the 1940s.

To experience the range of modernist styles, we shall read poetry of Pound, Eliot, H.D.,
Williams, Moore, Cummings, and Stevens; fiction of Anderson, Hemingway, Toomer,
Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Faulkner; and drama of O'Neill. Of the various
comminglings of literature and politics in the 1930s, we shall look at the documentary
reportage of Le Sueur, the proletarian drama of Odets, "engaged" poems of Rukeyser,
Fearing and Taggard (as well as skeptical responses from the earlier modernists), and two
"blendings": modernism and social realism in Dos Passos, and race and politics in
Wright.

Hemingway,In Our Time
Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Norton Critical Edition)
Wright, Native Son (restored text)
packet of readings (available only at Off-Campus Books)

Students will write one longer research paper (ca. 10 pp.) or two shorter ones (5
pp. each). A creative project may be substituted for one of the shorter papers.
Since class will proceed primarily by discussion, student participation, both oral
and written (as reaction papers for major readings), is also important and will
figure heavily in the final grade. A final exam is possible.

three paths towards abstraction
St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9, "Sigh" (handout/packet)
Paul Verlaine, "The Art of Poetry" (handout/packet)
Eliot, "Preludes" (handout/packet)
Stein, from Tender Buttons, "A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass," "A Method
of a Cloak," "This is This Dress, Aider" (Norton)

Imagism: 1912-1918
Flint, "Imagisme" (packet)
Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" (packet)
\u2014\u2014\u2014, "In a Station of the Metro" (Norton)
\u2014\u2014\u2014, "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (Norton)

H.D., "Oread" (Norton)
A. Lowell, "A Decade" (packet)
William Carlos Williams, \u201cNantucket\u201d (packet)

the great debacle: World War I
Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Parts 4 & 5 (Norton)
Lowell, "September, 1918" (Norton)
Cummings, "lis/-ten" (packet)
\u2014\u2014, "my sweet old etcetera aunt lucy" (packet)
Stevens, \u201cDeath of a Soldier (Norton)

postwar America: small-town horrors and philistines
Anderson, "Adventure" (Norton)
Mencken, "A Blind Spot" and "Gamalielese" (packet)
Lewis, fromBabbit (packet)

Harlem Renaissance
Toomer, fromCane: "Georgia Dusk," "Fern," ""Portrait in Georgia" and
"Seventh Street" (all in Norton)
Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (Norton)
\u2014\u2014\u2014, \u201cI, Too\u201d
McKay, "If We Must Die," (Norton)
\u2014\u2014\u2014, "The Lynching" (Norton)

** Hemingway, letter to parents (Norton)
\u2014\u2014, In Our Time: "On the Quai at Smyrna," all "Chapters" between
stories, \u201cL\u2019Envoi\u201d

Williams, "Death" (Norton)
\u2014\u2014\u2014, "The Locust Tree in Blossom" (both versions--packet)
\u2014\u2014\u2014, "This is Just to Say" (Norton)

Cummings, "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls" (Norton)
\u2014\u2014\u2014, "i will be" (packet)
Moore, "A Grave" (Norton)