Department of English

This spring English 84 will investigate the cultural terrain of the opening years of the twentieth century by focusing on five themes: "the end of American innocence" (to use Henry May's classic formulation), expatriation and the development of modernism, primitivism and the critique of urban civilization, the Harlem Renaissance, and politics and society in the Depression years. Readings will include novels, stories, poetry, autobiographies by Edith Wharton, Jack London, James Weldon Johnson, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Michael Gold, John Dos Passos, and Meridel LeSueur. Additional writers, such as Eugene O'Neill and John Steinbeck, will be covered by screenings of plays and films. Requirements will include a number of short papers; an oral presentation on a poem or short story or a related aesthetic form; participation in class; and a concluding project.