English 262 - Winter, 2012

American Literature after 1914

Class Information

Instructor: Stratton, Matthew
CRN: 32812
Time: W 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies

Description

Depressing Fictions of the American 1930s

The decade between 1929 and 1940 looms recurrently – perhaps uncomfortably – large in the American national imaginary: economic collapse, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, the Popular Front, disillusioned Communists and the emergence of the New Deal produced not only a perpetually contentious historiography, but an interwoven collection of novels, poetry, visual arts, philosophy, journalism, and literary criticism. While focusing on fiction and some poetry of the period, this course will investigate real and imagined relationships between these different forms of representation and different political formations.

Meetings will be structured around close readings of texts in the context of literary battles of the period and the retrospection of current criticism; class presentations, a short (2-pp.) periodical research response paper, and a 12-15-pp. conference-style paper will be required.

In addition to one novel or anthology per week, a substantial amount of required additional readings will be collected in a course reader, which may include selections from:

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
Mike Gold, "Proletarian Realism" (1930)
Marx, The Communist Manifesto and “Preface to a Critique of Political Economy”
League of Professional Groups, "Culture and the Crisis" (1932)
Granville Hicks, Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935)
James Farrell, A Note On Literary Criticism (1936)
Horace Gregory and Eleanor Clark, eds. New Letters in America (1937)
William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Literature in a Political Decade.”
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
Dwight MacDonald, “Trotsky is Dead” (1940)

Texts

Jews Without Money (1930), Mike Gold
Black No More (1931), George Schuyler
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), William Faulkner
The Unpossessed: A Novel of the Thirties (1934), Tess Slesinger
Moscow Yankee (1935), Myra Page
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans
Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Richard Wright
The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck
The Big Money (1936), John Dos Passos