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Instructors: Dr. Damien Schlarb
Event type:
Proseminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.122
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 45
Registration group: AS 122
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
Credit Requirements
- regular attendance
- weekly online responses
- final paper proposal with annotated bibliography
- final argumentative research paper
Intended Learning Outcomes
At the end of the course, students will be able to…
- name pertinent works and authors of American literary Modernism
- identify and name characteristic formal properties and techniques for this period
- identify and name relevant literary themes, stylistic devices, and motifs
- compare and contrasts texts based on their treatment of said themes, devices, and motifs
In order to reach these goals, students are required to…
- review analytical reading strategies, critical theories, and compositional strategies
- review socio-historical, philosophical, economical, and religious ideas that underpin the literature of the period
- relate these contexts to critical readings of primary texts
- explore their own thinking on these text through writing
- articulate relevant research questions, based on historical and literary analyses
- conceptualize an original research project that addresses those questions
- perform independent research into primary and secondary sources
- compose an original argumentative research essay that answers said questions
- perform critical literary analyses of primary literary texts and secondary criticism, based on pertinent critical theories, historical context, and hermeneutical strategies hypothesize textual meaning, based on textual evidence garnered by applying those strategies to primary texts
I will assume a basic familiarity with the techniques of literary analysis and academic writing on your part.
Required Materials
- Levine, Robert, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1914-1945. 9th ed. Vol. D. New York: Norton, 2016.
- Supplementary readings will be provided on ILIAS. Please be sure to log on at the beginning of the semester using the password stein1819.
Contents:
This course introduces students to early twentieth-century American literature. American literary Modernism, as the period between 1914 and 1945 is often referred to, was a project that tried to come to terms a broad spectrum of phenomena: the changed role of women in society, the economic lavishness of the “roaring 20s” and the subsequent disillusionment with finance capitalism in the Great Depression, the cultural and social effects of urbanization, the self-assertion of African American culture, but also the horrors of modern industrialized warfare and the unresolved regional and racial strife that dates back to the Civil War. Authors such as Jon Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot, Nella Larson, William Carlos Williams, Zora Neal Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Susan Glaspel, Wallace Stevens, Eugene O’Neill, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck will provide us with literary reactions to these issues. We will be interested in how these phenomena shape the literary forms of Modernism (for instance minimalism). To this end, our readings will include theoretical writings on the project of Modernism as well as examples of various literary genres: fiction and non-fiction prose, poetry, and drama. I will assume a basic familiarity with the techniques of literary analysis and academic writing on your part.
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