4:00p-5:15p TR (30) 3 cr

The primary work of this class will be the reading of several novels, stories, and poems written by Americans in the years since the First World War. We will focus our attention on the ways in which writers such as Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Kingston have imagined the worlds which Americans inhabit and the ways in which race, national origin, gender, and class inflect character and narrative. In our thinking and discussion during the semester particular care will be taken to examine the complex link between the political and social realities that form the substance of these works and the ways in which that substance is ordered as literary narrative. We will develop our understanding of 20th-century American writing as a complex and multivalent practice.