This is a survey class reviewing responses to modernity in American literature between World Wars I and II. 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 modernity and the disappearing traditions of the past. The use of the plural (modernisms and traditions) is crucial: the course will juxtapose canonical modernisms (for example, that of the post-war expatriate “lost generation”) to alternative modernisms emerging in the work of women and non-white authors. Throughout the quarter, we will ponder two major questions raised and answered in varying ways by each author: 1) What is modern fiction? Responses are formal experiments that generally (but not always) lead modernist fiction away from verisimilitude and 19th-century concern with socio-cultural content and towards a high self-consciousness about form: a focus on the medium of writing, the materiality of texts, narrative technique and constructedness of the language. 2) What constitutes modern American identity? Modernist narrative responds to the crisis of cultural authority and the breakdown of traditional society. Here, we will find that we can only speak of modern identities in the plural and trace alternative ways that modernity is articulated in different regional and ethnic cultures in the U.S. For example, Euro-modernists Hemingway, Cather, and Faulkner, who in varying ways are troubled by the social rise of “ethnic” newcomers and immigrants, often promoting exclusions on the basis of race, are partly at cross-purposes with writers of African American and Mexican American descent, whose “American” homelands immigrant Euro-Americans “inherited” by appropriation. Facing centuries-old legacies of slavery, conquest and colonization brought to completion by Euro-American modernity, some writers of color (such as Américo Paredes) testify to displacement and loss, with no apparent solution or hope for future renewal, while others (Hurston) embrace the promise of modern rearticulations of tradition.