American Literature and Culture in the 1930's

syllabus

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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.