American Lit., 1900-1945: The Modernist Canon and its Making
Rita Barnard profile
TR 10:30-12
This advanced seminar will study five of the most important and
acclaimed American modernists: T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest
Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens in a fairly
intensive and theoretical way (we will spend about 5 classes on each
author). Towards the end of the course we will, however, begin to ask
certain questions about the politics of literary fame. Why are these
authors more famous and more influential than, say, Abraham Lincoln
Gillespie, Mina Loy, Sol Funaroff, or Melvin Tolson? Can we say that
they are simply "better"? What difference does it make where one's
work appears and what one writes about? Has the institutionalization
of the academic canon involved a forgetting of the more radical
manifestations of modernist literature? To answer some of these
questions we will read a revisionist history of American modernism
(Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery, or Marcus Klein's Foreigners,
or Kenneth Rexroth's American Poetry in the Twentieth Century). Each
student will then be assigned an individualized final project on a
"minor" author, which will involve some rooting around in old
journals, forgotten anthologies, and literary magazines; these
projects will be presented in a mini-conference during the final week.
In addition to this final project, seminar participants will also be
required to write an 8-10 page paper (due around midterm) on any of
the "major" authors.
updated 2006-10-05
