9:30a-10:45a TR (70) 3 cr

TOPIC: WOMEN AND MODERNISM

This course will survey the achievements of British, American, and expatriate women writers during the first few decades of the twentieth-century, one of the most innovative periods in literary history. In the years that brought the development of automobiles, film, telegraphs, astrophysics, electrocardiography, and relativity theory, the arts underwent a major upheaval. To what extent did modernist experimentation reflect the changing situation of African-American and white women, heterosexual and lesbian women now organized in cross-Atlantic liberation movements? Another way to put the query at the core of this course: what were the sexual and racial politics of the New Negro and the New Woman?

One focus of our attention will be the Harlem Renaissance, the first moment in American history when African-American intellectuals and creative writers wrested representation control over their own images and programs. In this section of the course, we will study such thinkers, artists, and performers as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Anne Spencer, Marita Bonner, Josephine Baker, and Zora Neale Hurston. Another focus will be white novelists and poets like Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and H.D. In addition, we will look at writing about sexual experimentation by women of letters like Henry Handle Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, Katharine Mansfield, and Djuna Barnes.

Even though it is unwieldy in terms of weight, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women will be assigned so we can cover a great number of writers, though these will be supplemented with handouts and possibly a few novels: probably Woolf's To the Lighthouse , Nella Larsen's Quicksand , and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God .

Students will be expected to complete two papers as well as a midterm and a final exam. A mixture of mini-lectures and discussions will characterize most class sessions; however, we will also look at slides and films about modernist artistry.