American Literature and
Culture in the 1930's
syllabus
images
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We'll look at the variety of American novels produced
during the Great Depression. The course has three thematic centers.
1) the effect of social catastrophe on writers of fiction. The
Great Depression devasted American society in the years 1929-1941.
How did writers react to this nationwide sense of collapse? We'll
consider how retrospection and nostalgia define a sense of the
immediate and distant past for the 1930's and how the portrayal of
contemporary events attempts to define the moment. We'll also
consider how writers balanced their sense of themselves as members
of a shaken society with their idea of themselves as artists. 2)
The problem of Realism. Since the late nineteenth century America
novelists had pursued realism, both artistically and thematically,
as their goal. But by the 1930's realism had become both the dominant
style and for many writers an exhausted mode. We'll consider how
they worked out their relation to the imperatives of realism and what
kinds of alternatives they explored. 3) The 1930's mark the moment
in which movies replace novels as the defining mode of narrative.
How did the movies both as a narrative form and a social phenomenon
affect the ways in which novelists worked?
The underlying narrative of this course is how the novels
of this era can be seen in relation to the ways writers were thinking
about their responsibilities and possibilities, both social and
artistic. From our vantage point in 1998, we'll be trying not only
to understand the value of the particular works we read for a
contemporary audience, but the social and cultural position the
novel as an institution in this era. We'll do this in order to gain
perspective on what we think novels, or any works of art, are in
contemporary American society.
We'll read Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, John
Dos Passos' The Big Money, stories from Willa Cather's
Obscure Destinies, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom,
Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of Mountains , Raymond
Chandler's The Big Sleep, and Nathaniel West's The Day of
the Locust, essays and stories by these and other writers, and
watch two movies, The Grapes of Wrath, and Citizen
Kane.
Requirements: four short writing assignments, a long
essay, either a research or a critical essay, done in drafts, small
discussion groups meeting outside of class.
Prerequistes: English 152, 153, or 154 or consent of the
instructor
Writing Certification.