230324 American Modernism(s) (S) (SoSe 2022)

This seminar introduces students to literary texts from American Modernism(s). The seminar will address examples from the genres of poetry, the novel, and the short story. American Modernism(s) are characterized by thematic and stylistic innovation. Ezra Pound’s famous credo “Making it New” underlies many of the literary expressions in the first decades of the 20th century and expresses the modernist writers’ desire and willingness to experiment with language, narrative perspective, textual visualization, content, social attitude, and cultural critique. Students will engage with the above aspects of literary texts by reading and analyzing works by writers such as Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, William Carlos Williams among others. As back-up theoretical texts, excerpts from Meyer English and American Literatures and Nünning & Nünning An Introduction to the Study of English and American Literature will serve to connect the seminar to introductory AALT classes . While we will be conducting close readings of literary texts we will always look at text in context.