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 to characterize American modernity, we will consider how writers of the time framed “the modern” and “modernity” (and the attendant ideologies of innovation, newness, originality and progress) in and through logics of gender, sexuality, race, class and migration. In the process, we will also pinpoint how and the extent to which “American modernity” gathered ideological coherence through a production of the “non-modern” as a domain of dissident and “perverse” sexual, racial and gender formations.

Students should expect to read works by W.E.B. DuBois, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Nathanael West, Richard Bruce Nugent, John Dos Passos, Robert Park, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederic Winslow Taylor, Ernest Hemmingway and Jean Toomer, and a handful of critical essays by figures such as Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Huston Baker, Raymond Williams, Siobhan Somerville, Roderick Ferguson and Nayan Shah. Grades will be based on engaged participation, several short essays, and an 8 page final paper.