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Home 2012-2013 Undergraduate College Catalog Course Offerings English Courses ENG 2052: American Literature III: 20th Century (3 cr.)

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ENG 2052: American Literature III: 20th Century (3 cr.)

This course surveys American literature written from the end of WWI to the present, a span of years that includes the triumphs and disillusionments of two world wars, several massive economic slumps, ongoing fears of nuclear destruction, the end of Jim Crow, the achievements of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, and the increasing diversity of ethnic identities in the United States. The writers of this period were remarkably alert to these social changes and sought to respond through innovative formal techniques: modernist authors introduced difficult modes of allusion, myth, and stream of consciousness, as well as incorporating the fresh rhythms of jazz and vernacular slang; mid-century authors embraced an autobiographical mode of witness that straddles the boundary between confession and performance; and recent authors call our attention to the artificiality of storytelling as a discourse and the importance of personal identity in constructing literary voice. We will discuss these formal developments in relation to a variety of thematic concerns: the relationship between economic and erotic desire in the 1920s, modernist form and the history of violence, the rise of "beats" and "freaks" as voices of rebellion and conscience; the relationship between gender, geography, and racial identity in post-war America; and the infiltration of mass media into the domain of the literary. The reading list will likely include many of the following authors: Fitzgerald, Cather, Eliot, Hughes, Faulkner, O’Connor, Plath, Ginsberg, Nabokov, Ellison, Salinger, Morrison, Kingston, Robinson, Lahiri, Pynchon, Barth, Ashbery, Saunders, Diaz. *Note: ENG 1009 is a pre-requisite for admission into this course.

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