Taking the question “what does it mean to be modern?” as its guiding refrain, this course will explore the aesthetic practices and epistemologies through which Americans came to understand themselves as “modern” during the inter-war years. Addressing the aesthetic, economic and technological innovations often said characterize American modernism, we will consider how writers of the time located the concepts “the modern” and “modernity” in relation to notions of innovation, newness, originality and progress. But we will be equally interested in considering how “the modern” came to be naturalized as a universal human aspiration over and against formations of the “non-modern”—formations, we will find, often racialized, sexualized, and gendered as dissident and perverse.

Reading will include novels by Barnes, Dos Passos, Larsen and McKay; stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, Hurston, Nugent, Paredes, and Wright; and poems by Crane, Eliot, Hughes, Pound, and Williams.