Literary responses to modernity in American literature between the wars. We’ll read selected novels and short stories, focusing on experiments in form and the development of new cultural identities by American writers as they negotiate the ambivalent (disruptive and liberating) impact of forces of modernity with the disappearing traditions of the past. The use of the plural (modernisms and traditions) is crucial; the course will juxtapose canonical modernisms (i.e. that of the post-war expatriate “lost generation”) to alternative modernisms emerging in the work of women and non-Anglo American writers. Texts: Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925); Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926); Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1936); Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez (written 1930s; 1990); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929).