ENGL 210
American Modernism Spring 2010
Division I
Cross-listed AMST 210 / ENGL 210
This is not the current course catalog

“Modernism” in literature refers to texts from the second half of the nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century. These works are typically at once self-referential and extra-referential; books acutely aware of their own status as language nevertheless aspire to describe, or even save, the world beyond words. Insofar as modernism posits an aestheticism that can seem redemptive, a concern of the course will be the relation of modernism to modernity: the new world that needs saving. The American version of modernism will have the additional challenge of producing out of the difficulties of self-conscious fiction a redemption that suits a democracy–and a multiply divided democracy at that. Writers of the course will include DuBois, Larsen, Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein, Toomer, Hurston, Williams and Agee.