Make it New! American Modernism (Schäfer)

In this course we will study the innovative work that such modernist writers as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, John Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein produced in the first decades of the twentieth century. We will read short stories and novels that break with the conventions of nineteenth-century realism in an effort to give voice to the experience of a modern America marked by the rapid growth of cities and immigrant communities, swiftly changing race and gender politics, new concepts of subjectivity and space-time, accelerating commercial activity, and the suffusion of daily life and work routines by technological inventions, such as cars or assembly lines. As we examine and enjoy the formal experiments of these modernist writers, we will study how innovations in painting, photography, and film served them as a model for their break with literary tradition, and we will consider their impetus “to make it new” as an enabling response to the pressures of modernization.