Department of English

This course will examine major themes and figures in American literature from the first half of the 20th century. We’ll consider American versions of literary modernism and representations of historical and cultural experience: immigration, growing up in America, moving from country to city, World War I, the Jazz Age and expatriatism, the Depression, segregation, Hollywood and Broadway, and the world of journalism. Writers may include Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, e.e.cummings, Wallace Stevens, Sherwood Anderson, and John Dos Passos. Emphasis will be on fiction and poetry, with some attention to non-fiction and drama. Frequent short writing assignments, as well as mid-term and final essays.