This course introduces students to twentieth-century American literature (1914-present) focusing on the relationship between historical survey and textual analysis. It is important to present literary history as a lively interaction between prevailing values of such a given time, on the one hand, and individual minds and talents, on the other, emphasizing distinctions among those minds and differences in how they each engage with a historical predicament. If the historical roots of the survey lie in an early-twentieth-century wish to acculturate an increasingly diverse population and stave off chaos by requiring a kind of collective homage to a sequence of supposedly heroic (and white male) American authors, then in the new millennium, one valid subject for us to discuss is the survey itself, the cultural work that it can do, and the right of students to participate in reviewing and defining that mission.

Rather than studying the texts and authors chronologically, we will work around repositories of themes. In other words, a key purpose of this course is to explore the text rather than situate it – to help students talk about voice, style, poetics, and rhetorical strategy and understand how community affiliation, minority status, or other pressures on a given artist affect the choice and ordering of words on the page. Another difference in defying the traditional pedagogical practice of reading linearly and analyzing isolated texts or authors is to open the students’ eyes to the awareness of how the differences in gender, in ethnicity, in social power, and in historical circumstances affect literary imagination and style. We will compare traditions and discourses of marginality, minority, and diversity. There are multifarious tasks in defining modern and contemporary American literature – a Babel of competing values and voices, a chaos forced into shape and continuity by scholars and teachers. Literature, culture, politics, race, gender, class conflict, faith, the meaning of “literacy,” “history,” “nation,” “p