American Modernism – Core Course

This survey course will focus on works published during the interwar era (1918-1939). Often dubbed the “modernist” phase in American literary history, this period saw an explosion of literary innovation, as young writers began to experiment with new topics and forms of expression. Running the gamut from Ernest Hemingway’s clipped, hard-boiled style, through John Dos Passos' fragmented collages, to William Faulkner’s baroque, grandiloquent rhetoric, modernist formal experimentation challenged established notions of literary form and broke new paths for the novel. Thematically, too, post-WWI iconoclasts broke with earlier conventions, and explored themes of violence, alienation, racial discrimination and poverty with new urgency and force.  Often bewildering, at times frustrating, always demanding—the writers on our syllabus had transformed American literature.