Course meetings:             Mondays, periods 6-8 (12:50-3:50), English seminar room
Instructor:                         Susan Hegeman
Telephone:                        392-6650 x 289
e-mail:                                shegeman@english.ufl.edu
Office Hours:                    TBA
 

This course will interrogate the very applicability of the periodizing term "modernism" to the literary production of the U.S., circa 1900-1950.  Traditional descriptions of the historical contexts of literary modernism emphasize the impact of crises such as World War I, and the international loci of Paris and London. Such narratives offer significant problems for the historian of American literature. For example, we might be tempted to conclude that the U.S., which remained neutral until very late in WWI, was not affected by the upheavals that produced new aesthetic experiments, or that only the writers who emigrated to Paris counted as modernists. How do we construct an international frame for modernism that accounts for European modernists' fascinations with "Americanism," on the one hand, and strong regionalist and even nativist tendencies on the part of  many U.S. writers, on the other? How indeed do we account for some unique features of the U.S. in this period, including the emergence of artistic bohemias specific to the U.S. in Greenwich Village and later in Harlem,  the tension between the hyper-modern cities and the still modernizing countryside, the powerful popular cultural industry, and finally the emergence of the U.S. as a superpower after World War II?

The organization of this class takes a few things for granted.  First, it assumes that the exercise of periodization is important not only for understanding literary history, but for understanding processes of cultural change generally. "Modernism" will therefore be understood not simply in terms of formal style, but as a particular historical conjuncture, occurring around the turn of the 20th century. Second (and more problematically) it assumes the relative coherence of the idea of "America." Though this premise is subject to the related charges of nationalism and exceptionalism (the view that the U.S. has a special history or destiny, autonomous from the rest of the world and its history), it will be used in this class as a provisional idea, on the way to reimagining the literary production of the U.S. back into an international context.  As we shall see, the cultural status of the U.S. was hotly debated in the early twentieth century, and so addressing the topic of "American modernism" brings us back into one of the crucial aesthetic debates of the period, both in the U.S. and abroad.
 
 

1. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Centuryby Christine Stansell Owl Books ISBN: 0805067353
2. In The American Grainby William Carlos Williams New Directions ISBN: 0811202305
3. Winesburg, Ohioby Sherwood Anderson Norton Critical Edition ISBN: 0393967956
4. The New Negroed. Alain Locke Touchstone Books ISBN: 0684838311
5. Caneby Jean Toomer Norton Critical Edition ISBN: 0393956008
6. Reading1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modernby Michael North Oxford UP ISBN: 0195151631
7. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes -and- But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Ladyby Anita Loos Penguin ISBN: 0141180692
8. The Big Moneyby John Dos Passos Mariner Books ISBN: 0618056831
9. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Artby Serge Guilbaut U Chicago P ISBN: 0226310396
10. The Waste Landby T.S. Eliot Norton Critical Edition ISBN: 0393974995

All books available at Goerings'  Textbook Store ("Books and Bagels")
 
 

August 23              Syllabus review and introductory discussion: ìAmerican modernismî?

The City and the Country/ Bohemia and its others, take 1

August 30              Stansell, American Moderns
September 6          labor day; no class
September 13       Williams, In The American Grain
September 20       Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

The City and the Country/ Bohemia and its Others, take 2

September 27      The New Negro
October 4               Toomer, Cane
 

Modernism High and Low

October 11             North, Reading 1922
October 18             Modern Times (film) d. Charlie Chaplin
October 25             Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
November 1          Dos Passos, The Big Money

Late Modernism; or, American Modernism, take 2

November 8          Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art
November 15        essays by Clement Greenberg and others
November 22        Eliot, The Waste Land