The below is a course sketch, not a fully realized syllabus. It provides information about the pedagogical approach and primary texts the course would propose to cover.
Rather than considering modernism a particular aesthetic style, this course approaches it more basically: artistic reactions to modernity. The phase of modernity usually associated with artistic modernisms is approximately 1900-1950, though its origins stretch back to the Enlightenment and its practices in many ways can be said to continue in our own time.
This period in U.S. culture was characterized by the advent of modern modes of commodity production and the new warfare made possible by these technologies and modes of production. The physical and psychic decimation wrought by these advances in technology at the same time produced over time a tremendous wealth for a certain segment of U.S. society, including a burgeoning middle class, and a vastly increased global power for the United States.
As technology changed, so did modes of communication, and literature is most basically a mode of communication. In describing the poetic form of this age, William Carlos Williams famously declared: “To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.”
This course will examine work from the major genres of poetry, the novel, and drama in the age of the machine. Rather than privileging what is sometimes called “High Modernism” by conflating it with modernism in general, we’ll look at varied literary approaches, examining multiple iterations of the experimentation that characterized aesthetic work in the period. Organizationally, we’ll group our texts around themes related to key cultural issues in the period. We do this not to erase the importance of aesthetics, but rather to draw it out—in looking at varied aesthetic approaches to related issues, we can profitably compare and contrast them.
Weeks 1-5: Alienation and Experimentation
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Ezra Pound, selections from Cathay
William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All
Hart Crane, The Bridge
Weeks 6-10: The Color Line
Faulkner, Absolom, Absolom!
Jean Toomer, Cane
Black Elk and John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks
Weeks 11-15: Labor and Language
John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty
Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead