ENGL - 360. American Literature of the Jazz Age

3 credit(s)
This course will examine literary works written primarily during the 1920s, a period of intense cultural freedom as well as restraint within the United States. On the one hand, this was the heyday of flappers and speakeasies; on the other hand, the Jazz Age was darkened by the historical trauma of the First World War as well as the economic hardships of The Crash of 1929 and the impending Great Depression. We will discuss the contributions of the “Lost Generation” of American expatriate authors in Paris and witness the cultural flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. Readings may include fiction by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; poetry by Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and e.e. cummings; and drama by Eugene O’Neill. To give a fuller sense of both the era and its literature, we may also explore other cultural media of the “Roaring Twenties,” such as experimental painting, silent film, blues music, and of course jazz.

Attribute: ARTS, ALST, AMSC