11:15A-12:30P  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 Eliot, Steinbeck, Morrison 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 link between the political and social realities that form the substance of
these works and the ways in which that substance is imagined as story.  We will try to develop
our understanding of recent American writing as a complex and multivalent practice.
This course is organized around the notion that American literature may best be understood as a
conversation rather than a singular tradition.  That is, American literature is defined here as a
discursive practice based on an actual plurality rather than an imagined unity. The books that
structure this course represent different "takes" on what we might consider the spacial, historic,
and political commonalities of the American experience and the normative tropes of the
American literary imagination.  However, the aforementioned "imagined unity" is still vital,
whether or not we think it is necessary.  As a result we will find ourselves struggling with its
power to organize the particularities of American writers and its tenacious ability to direct and
define the limits of what is possible in the American literary imagination.