This course will concentrate on the invention of modernism, starting with Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in poetry and with the prose experiments of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. We will explore the paradox of an extraordinary burst of new writing--richly diverse and original, radically experimental--whose pervasive themes seem to be cynicism, despair, lamentation, and nihilism. Using T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) as a central text for questions about the American landscape, we will discuss Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930), Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918), and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930). We will also discuss some of the best writing to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance--portions of Jean Toomer's Cane, poetry by Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Then we will look at some other versions of modernism in the 1930s--John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore--before turning back again to the beginnings of the period and the poetry of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, both writers who absorb and remake the more flamboyant modernist ideas of their contemporaries. We will conclude with discussion of Elizabeth Bishop's early poetry and Eudora Welty's first book of stories, A Curtain of Green (1941). 

Texts: We will use The Norton Anthology of American Literature (5th Edition, Vol. 2), supplemented with individual paperback editions of The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and A Curtain of Green. 

General requirements: Weekly response essays (1-2 pp.), two formal essays (7-9 pp.), a self-scheduled mid-term examination, and a traditional final examination. 

Pre-requisites: None, but at least one college-level literature course is strongly recommended.