ENGL 451

Spring 2023 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 17-May 3

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 spring 2023
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32194	Lecture-Discussion	1G	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	Henry Administration Bldg	Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/17/23-05/03/23 Credit: 4 hours Section Info: SP23 ENGL 451, American Literary Modernism, Tim Newcomb - Life in the United States changed as drastically between 1914 and 1945 as in any thirty years of the nation’s history. Americans lived through a war of unprecedented carnage, followed by a bizarre decade of pleasure-seeking and financial speculation (and illegal alcohol!), then a worldwide economic depression, and finally an even more destructive global war. Writers of these decades addresses 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 capture the 20th-century world’s possibilities and terrors. ENGL 451 examines this remarkable period and these big questions: What makes the “modern world” modern? How did concepts like nation, race, gender, class, and mass culture shape 20th-century identities? 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? Among the key authors who will take us on this journey will be T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Nella Larsen, and Nathanael West. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
	32189	Lecture-Discussion	1U	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	Henry Administration Bldg	Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/17/23-05/03/23 Credit: 3 hours Section Info: SP23 ENGL 451 American Literary Modernism, Tim Newcomb - Life in the United States changed as drastically between 1914 and 1945 as in any thirty years of the nation’s history. Americans lived through a war of unprecedented carnage, followed by a bizarre decade of pleasure-seeking and financial speculation (and illegal alcohol!), then a worldwide economic depression, and finally an even more destructive global war. Writers of these decades addresses 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 capture the 20th-century world’s possibilities and terrors. ENGL 451 examines this remarkable period and these big questions: What makes the “modern world” modern? How did concepts like nation, race, gender, class, and mass culture shape 20th-century identities? 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? Among the key authors who will take us on this journey will be T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Nella Larsen, and Nathanael West. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.