Course : American Modernism

Date

Material

Week 1

General Introduction and Overview.

American Modernism Definitions (Handout No1)

Ezra Pound, from "A Retrospect" (1918) (Handout No2)

Willa Cather, from “The Novel Démeublé” (1922) (Handout No3)

Week 2

Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow"

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) (Handbook 4) and excerpt from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)

Week 3

Sherwood Anderson, “The Book of the Grotesque,” “Hands,” 

"An Awakening,” from Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Marshall Berman, Intro to All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (15-36)

Week 4

High Modernism

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926)

Baz Luhrmann, The Great Gatsby (2013 film)

Jack Clayton, The Great Gatsby (1974 film)

Week 5

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (cont.) 

Week 6

 Experimental Fictions

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925);

chapter 1 Ferryslip; chapter 5 Steamroller

Week 7

Nella Larsen, Passing (1929), part II

Week8

The "Lost Generation"- Expatriate Fictions

Gertrude Stein, "Melanctha," from Three Lives;

Rita Felski, Intro to The Gender of Modernism (1-9)

Week 9

The Hollywood Novel

Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust (1939)

Week  10

Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust cont.

Week 11

Late Modernism

Anais Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (1954)

Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism”

Week  12

  A Spy in the House of Love      cont.