1:00p-2:15p TR (30) 3 cr.
We will begin with Theodore Dreiser’s turn-of-the-century novel Sister Carrie. It will take us, as well as its title character, from Indiana to Chicago and New York, cities that symbolized for many people the surging forces of modern American society. We will then move through pairings of texts, in each case comparing fiction from the 1920s with contemporary fiction on the same subject. We will read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby in conjunction with Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine, analyzing how each treats the self-transforming American. We will compare Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection In Our Time with Tim O’Brien’s volume of stories The Things They Carried, analyzing their treatments of war. We will read Nella Larsen’s novel Passing together with Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, analyzing how race, gender, and sexual orientation figure in each. We will compare William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury with Joyce Carol Oates’s novel We Were The Mulvaneys, both of which chronicle the decline of a family. We will conclude the course by returning to a city with which we began, New York, examining how Paul Auster depicts it in his novel City of Glass. If Dreiser’s novel is often seen as inaugurating modern American fiction, Auster’s is now regarded as epitomizing postmodernism. Indeed, through all our comparisons, we will attempt to understand twentieth-century fiction as a set of similarities and differences between modernism and postmodernism.
Classes will be mostly discussion. Required writing will include
brief, informal reactions to the readings; midterm and final exams;
and three four-page papers.