Becoming Modern: American Literature 1880-1920

Looking at the generation before the 'Lost Generation,' this course explores a period in which 'modernistic' techniques and representations were unfolding from the jangling dissonances, the jarring juxtapositions, and the tumbling orthodoxies that accompanied the tectonic technological and social shifts around the turn of the century. Topics and contexts include: immigration, urbanization, race, the 'New Woman,' cultural developments (vaudeville, cinema, ragtime and the blues), and contemporaneous theories of consciousness and sexuality.