ENGL 3735 - American Modernism and Popular Culture

(crosslisted)
(also AMST 3730) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

G. Hutchinson.

This course will focus on major works of American literature during a period when American writing achieved its highest level (so far) of international influence and prestige. We will also have a look at popular culture in the period to get some sense of the convergences and divergences between “literature” and popular media. Students will come to a basic understanding of literary modernism and its responses to historical crises. Issues of race in American modernism will have a significant place in the course. Texts will include works by T.S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neill, Nella Larsen, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Flannery O’Connor, and Allen Ginsburg, as well as Batman comics and a couple of films.