Module description
This module will explore some of the relationships between ethnicity, migration, imperialism, place, race, technology and modernisms in US artistic and literary culture from the turn of the twentieth century through to the 1930s. The period under question includes cultural responses to the fallout of late nineteenth-century governmental Americanisation projects; competing claims for the ‘new’; responses to the Great Depression and New Deal state interventions; and the development of an American modernist aesthetic avant-garde.
Our approach will be to focus on four points of activity: New Mexico, the Mid-West, Paris and New York. In each case we will look at written texts within an interdisciplinary approach that learns from looking at painting and photography, journalism and the world of ‘little magazines’, new styles of dance and, of course, jazz.
Assessment details
4000 word essay (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
- To introduce students to the modernisms of a variety of ethnic and cultural groups from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s
- To allow students to think about American modernism in relation to dominant and emerging trends in critical thought and culture around race and ethnicity.
- To consider how the category of "modernism" functions in American space and internationally
- To expand students' sense of what constitutes "American" literary culture through reading texts from outside of the traditional academic canon alongside canonical figures
- To offer a broad experience of interdisciplinary study across the expressive and creative arts and the social sciences
Learning outcomes
- Understanding of the centrality of questions and debates focusing on race and ethnicity in American culture in the first decades of the twentieth century
- Knowledge of the range and creative fertility of modernist expression in American culture during this period
- Confidence in dealing with a broad range of material
- Agility in inter-disciplinary study
Teaching pattern
2 hour seminar, weekly
Suggested reading list
- Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909)