Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

This course is designed to introduce you to the most exciting literary and cultural moment in twentieth century America: modernism, the Jazz Age, the emergence of big city culture, the rise of a political left. This is the time of migrations from the South to the North, of exile and off-shore displacements through which American artists and writers stretched the boundaries of their local towns to open a world conversation about art and, never on the side, about race and gender. This is the debut of an avant-garde in music and literature, of radical experiments with poetry and performance; it signals the rise of new technologies, especially radio and film.

The early decades of the twentieth century also mark the moment of radical politics in the USA staged against anti-immigrant laws and the repression of minority cultures. At times, the arts expose the failures of politics and the law; at other times, they bring forward the ghosts of history that most people had hoped to forget. As an ensemble, they touch unspoken truths and teach us new ways to read and listen.

Our course will investigate the ways in which different political questions surrounding ethnicity and race gain a presence in modernist literature. In particular, we will focus on that kind of literature that affirms and interrogates the power of voice. We’ll see how “voice work” (orality, bilingualism, the art of gossip or translation, voice as performance) challenges the authoritative speech that claims to define the nation while it also creates a new authority for the minor or “outsider” speaker. In this way, literary voice–with its underside of silence and secrets–becomes the center of a radical innovation in style, and often competes with the power of voice claimed by radio and film. We see this in the language experiments of Gertrude Stein and the “newsreel” novels of John Dos Passos, in the prose fiction of Harlem Renaissance writers Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen who explored orality along with concepts of self-affirmation and passing; in the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Frank Lima who as Puerto Rican writers living in New York transformed their Hispanic roots through writing.

Our route takes us from California to New York and then to Southern borders, where a migration of Mexicans to California and Texas gives rise to new poetry and song; others seek to explore the blackness by seeking connections to the Caribbean islands. In these cases, a bilingual impulse redefines the modernist reach, and sets the stage for the Nuyorican poets of the 1970s. The course ends with William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a magisterial novel about North/South relations, race, secrets and incest, all told through contradictory voices that stutter or shout as they stumble through national history.

On Fridays, 4 sections to be taught by GSIs Matt Gonzales and Tara Phillips

Required Texts;

Dos Passos, John. The 42nd Parallel. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

ISBN: 0-618-05681-5 ro 978-0-618-05681-1

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York; Vintage, 1990.

ISBN: 0-679-73218-7

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes were Watching God. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.

ISBN: 0-96-093141-8

Larsen, Nella. Passing (1929) New York : Random House (Penguin Edition), 2002.

ISBN: 0-375-75813-5