Learning Outcomes:
● Demonstrate ability to discuss complex ideas in class and in written assignments
● Perform close-reading of texts leading to nuanced analysis
● Work with key insights in critical race theory, social history, narrative theory, gender & sexuality.
● Awareness of historical context, expression & regulation of gender, sexual, and racial identities
● Proficiency in American literary modernisms
Indicative Module Content:
The course will explore the effects of world wars, depressions, feminism, and changing cityscapes upon the form and range of narrated relationships. We will cross the century’s early decades, following its lovers through rural towns, Greenwich Village bohemia, expatriate Paris, modernist Harlem, and the American south. The course will take shape around weekly discussions. Readings from magazines, novels, and short fiction will be placed in dialogue with the journalists, psychologists, sexologists, activists, and reformers of the era. The course will proceed in three parts, “Courtship to Altar: The Evolution of Modern Marriage,” “Broken Bonds: Adultery, Divorce, Violence,” and “Beyond the Marriage Plot: Queer, Free Loving, and Single.” We will explore the diversity of modern and modernist love, from courtship to the marital home and beyond—to divorce capitals, queer liaisons, utopias, and friendships.
Course readings may include works by Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Kate Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Richard Bruce Nugent.