ENGL 451

Fall 2019 All Classes

All Classes

American Literature in the Age of Modernism

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Credit: 3 OR 4 hours.

American literature in the age of Modernism includes some of the most influential and provocative writing in the nation's history. American writers responded to a series of upheavals including changing gender and race relations, World War I, the "Roaring Twenties," and the Great Depression by pursuing both boundary-breaking themes and revolutionary experiments in form. Readings will include a generous selection from such writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Dashiell Hammett, D'Arcy McNickle, Carson McCullers, and many others.

3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: One year of college literature or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 451 class schedule data for fall 2019
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	40398	Lecture-Discussion	1G	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	131 English Building	Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: American Lit 1914 to 1945 Section Info: Life in the United States may have changed more drastically between 1914 and 1945 than in any thirty years of the nation’s history. In these three decades Americans lived through a war of unprecedented carnage, a bizarre decade of pleasure-seeking and financial speculation (and illegal alcohol), a worldwide economic depression, and finally, an even more destructive global war. American writers of these decades found ways to address crucial questions about the failings and possibilities of a world of dizzying technological change, and political upheaval so drastic that they often felt compelled to doubt the future of American democracy. Compelled to write about the new challenges of an urbanizing and modernizing world, writers and artists rejected lingering Victorian prohibitions on subject matter. Dissatisfied with inherited forms and styles of writing, they experimented tirelessly with new ones that they hoped would better captured the 20th-century world’s wrenching instability. We’ll examine this eventful period through the theme of “the city” as the arena where modernity took place. By 1900 the United States (like most countries in the industrialized world) had crossed a fundamental threshold from primarily rural to primarily urban. But not all urban spaces are the same; we’ll trace how competing models of urban space shaped the literature and politics of the early 20th century, and investigate how the emergence of the city as the dominant modern space made American society what it is, for better and worse. Among the questions we’ll consider: What makes the “modern world” modern? How did concepts like nation, race, gender, class, mass culture shape 20th-century identity? How did life-changing technologies, and the unpredictable sociopolitical changes they brought, produce new styles of behavior, compulsion, and creation? Where, if anywhere, is God in such a world? How might the arts reveal, and conceivably change, that world? Before we’re done we’ll come to see that the intense responses of these writers to their challenging world helped to define modern culture, and offer us a lens for imagining where we might be heading a century later. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
	30177	Lecture-Discussion	1U	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	131 English Building	Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/19-12/11/19 Credit: 3 hours Section Title: American Lit 1914 to 1945 Section Info: Life in the United States may have changed more drastically between 1914 and 1945 than in any thirty years of the nation’s history. In these three decades Americans lived through a war of unprecedented carnage, a bizarre decade of pleasure-seeking and financial speculation (and illegal alcohol), a worldwide economic depression, and finally, an even more destructive global war. American writers of these decades found ways to address crucial questions about the failings and possibilities of a world of dizzying technological change, and political upheaval so drastic that they often felt compelled to doubt the future of American democracy. Compelled to write about the new challenges of an urbanizing and modernizing world, writers and artists rejected lingering Victorian prohibitions on subject matter. Dissatisfied with inherited forms and styles of writing, they experimented tirelessly with new ones that they hoped would better captured the 20th-century world’s wrenching instability. We’ll examine this eventful period through the theme of “the city” as the arena where modernity took place. By 1900 the United States (like most countries in the industrialized world) had crossed a fundamental threshold from primarily rural to primarily urban. But not all urban spaces are the same; we’ll trace how competing models of urban space shaped the literature and politics of the early 20th century, and investigate how the emergence of the city as the dominant modern space made American society what it is, for better and worse. Among the questions we’ll consider: What makes the “modern world” modern? How did concepts like nation, race, gender, class, mass culture shape 20th-century identity? How did life-changing technologies, and the unpredictable sociopolitical changes they brought, produce new styles of behavior, compulsion, and creation? Where, if anywhere, is God in such a world? How might the arts reveal, and conceivably change, that world? Before we’re done we’ll come to see that the intense responses of these writers to their challenging world helped to define modern culture, and offer us a lens for imagining where we might be heading a century later. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.