Courses

This course is designed to introduce you to the American branch of the transatlantic
ferment of experiment and innovation across the arts—literature, music, painting—known
as modernism. An explosion of creative energy starting around 1920, American modernism
was a young generation’s revolt against an older America, an essentially rural one ruled by
Puritanism and Victorianism with their stolid norms of bourgeois propriety and
disciplinary vigilance.  The twenties saw the advent of a new urban world of “the Jazz
Age,” “the Lost Generation,” and the Harlem Renaissance, all sites of subversive ventures
in literary and self-expression.  Our authors will include Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest
Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot and Wallace
Stevens, these last four authors crafting formal experiments in fiction and poetry that make
unprecedented and exciting demands upon the reader’s way of making sense of the world.
Robert Frost and Willa Cather will round out the course, compelling voices of rural New
England and the Southwest, respectively.