This course is a US-focused case study in modernism in the context of the broader transformation of print and literacy in the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time an American-dominated modernism was thought to cover nearly everything of interest in (early) twentieth-century literature, but scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the limitations of this approach, which ignores or devalues a wide range of literary production that does not resemble classic modernism. In order to grasp the effects of the structural transformations that affected reading and writing broadly in the period, this course proposes that modernism and its many non-modernist others are best studied as joint products of an expanding, fragmenting, and polarizing literary field. To give our inquiry some heuristic limits, we accept a US national frame, bearing in mind as we read individual writers that really, universally, literary relations stop nowhere. The course is divided into two parts. The first half of the course gives a selective overview of American modernism up to 1940. The second half of the course is a series of rapid introductions to a few key US literary tendencies contemporary with but distinct from modernism: the Harlem Renaissance, proletarian literature, and several genres of commercial fiction. Needless to say we cannot cover the field in its totality, but our goal is to articulate some of the themes, transformations, and interpretive problems that an expansive literary history of the twentieth century encounters.
Detailed syllabus: syllabus.pdf.
Rotating presentation assignment: presentation.pdf.
Paper assignment: paper.pdf.
This page last updated: May 10, 2026.
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January 21. Introduction (handout).
- Modernism, non-modernism, modernity; questions of method.
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January 28. Frameworks; naturalism, via Crane.
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Kaestle and Radway, A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, chaps. 1, 3, 6.
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Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 71–91, 103–9, 113–31, 138–59, 214–23.
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Crane, The Open Boat and Other Stories, selections:
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Campbell, “The Rise of Naturalism.”
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February 4. Aestheticism, via James (handout).
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James, The Ambassadors, books 1–6.
- The Oxford Classics edition explains some of the complexities of this novel’s textual history; for a very detailed discussion see (optionally) Anesko, “The Textual Condition of The Ambassadors: A Revised Scenario.”
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Freedman, Professions of Taste, introduction (and optionally, 192–201).
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February 11. Modernism, via James (handout).
- James, The Ambassadors, complete.
- Goble, “Wired Love.”
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February 18. Expat modernism, the short version (handout).
- Stein, “Melanctha.”
- Hemingway, in our time (1924 hipster version).
- Hemingway, In Our Time (1925), especially “Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River.”
- Porter, “Flowering Judas.”
- Porter, Hacienda.
- Lawrence, The Anxieties of Experience, chap. 4.
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February 25. Class to be rescheduled.
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March 4. Institutions of modernism: poetry (handout).
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Little-magazine explorations via the Modernist Journals Project. Look unsystematically at:
- Camera Work, special number (August 1912): Stein, Matisse, Picasso.
- Blast 1, no. 1 (June 1914): the “Great English Vortex” (mostly the Canadian Lewis and the American Pound).
- Little Review 3, no. 6 (September 1916): a quick read.
- Others 3, no. 4 (December 1916). Read Williams’s “El Hombre” (24).
- Poetry 15, no. 1 (October 1919): Stevens in a magazine context.
- Little Review 7, no. 4 (January–March 1921): after Ulysses had to end its run.
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Volume explorations (*: bring in printout):
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*Eliot, The Waste Land, including, of course, the notes.
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Stevens, Harmonium:
- “Earthy Anecdote.”
- “Domination of Black.”
- *“The Snow Man.”
- *“Nuances of a Theme by Williams.”
- “Metaphors of a Magnifico.”
- “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.”
- *“The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”
- *“Sunday Morning.”
- “Bantams in Pine-Woods.”
- *“Anecdote of the Jar.”
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
- “To the Roaring Wind.”
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Moore, Observations:
- “To an Intra-Mural Rat.”
- “To a Steam-Roller.”
- “To a Snail.”
- “In This Age of Hard Trying…”
- *“Poetry” (but the more famous version, which you should also read, appeared in the 1924 Observations)
- “Critics and Connoisseurs.”
- *“The Fish.”
- *“England.”
- “New York.”
- “Silence.”
- “An Octopus.”
- “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns.”
- …including, of course, the notes.
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Williams, Spring and All, prose and poems from the beginning through Poem VIII; Poems XVIII, XXII, XXVII.
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Kenner, A Homemade World, introduction and chap. 3.
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Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, chap. 3 (and optionally, introduction).
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March 11. Faulkner, or, technique (handout).
- Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.
- Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury.”
- Michaels, Our America, chap. 1.
- Wall, “Sound and Fury.”
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(March 18. Spring recess.)
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March 25. Barnes, or, style (handouts).
- Barnes, Nightwood.
- Herring, Queering the Underworld, chap. 4.
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(Friday, March 28.)
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April 1. Modernism vs. the Renaissance (handout).
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Locke, The New Negro, selections:
- Alain Locke, foreword.
- Alain Locke, “The New Negro.”
- Albert C. Barnes, “Negro Art and America.”
- Jean Toomer, “Carma, from Cane.”
- Jean Toomer, “Fern, from Cane.”
- Zora Neale Hurston, “Spunk.”
- Eric Walrond, “The Palm Porch.”
- “Poetry” (all selections, 129–150).
- Gwendolyn B. Bennett, “Song.”
- Langston Hughes, “Jazzonia.”
- Langston Hughes, “Nude Young Dancer.”
- Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts.”
- Paul U. Kellogg, “The Negro Pioneers.”
- Melville J. Herskovits, “The Negro’s Americanism.”
- W. E. B. DuBois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out.”
- “Who’s Who of the Contributors.”
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Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 396–433.
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Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, chap. 8.
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Owens, “‘Hard Reading.’”
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April 8. Recuperation (handout).
- Hurston, Their Eyes.
- Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears.”
- Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.”
- Sorensen, Ethnic Modernism, chap. 5.
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April 15. Proletarian literature (at an angle) (handout).
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Smedley, “Cell Mates.”
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Hughes, Collected Poems, selected 1930s poems:
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From A New Song:
- “Let America be America Again.”
- “Open Letter to the South.” See also Negro Worker 2, no. 7 (July 15, 1932): 31–32, National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
- “Ballads of Lenin.”
- “A New Song.” It first appeared in Opportunity 11, no. 1 (January 1933), but the pages are missing on HathiTrust…
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“Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria,” New Masses 7, no. 7 (December 1931): 17.
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“Ph.D,” Opportunity 10, no. 8 (August 1932): 249, HathiTrust.
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“Good Morning Revolution,” New Masses 8, no. 3 (September 1932): 5.
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“Always the Same,” Negro Anthology: 1931–1933, ed. Nancy Cunard (London: Nancy Cunard at Wishart, 1934), 427, nypl.org.
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“Goodbye Christ,” Negro Anthology, 428, nypl.org.
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“Cubes,” New Masses 10, no. 11 (March 13, 1934): 22.
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“One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A,” Western Worker, November 6, 1933: 6.
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“Ballad of Roosevelt,” New Republic, November 14, 1934 (not digitized).
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Ibid, from Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951:
- “Dream Boogie.”
- “Theme for English B.”
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Le Sueur, “I Was Marching.”
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Gold, “Jews Without Money.” (A taste of the novel of the same title.)
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Denning, The Cultural Front, pt. 3, chap. 5.
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April 22. Slick fiction (handout).
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Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
- The Harper’s Bazar serial publication is available in scans on the Internet Archive.
- Daniel G. Tracy, ed., Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: A Critical Edition (Urbana: Windsor & Downs/Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2025). In addition to the startlingly extensive apparatus, this edition also hosts higher-quality reproductions of the illustrations than in the Penguin Classics paperback.
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McGurl, The Novel Art, chap. 4.
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Optional: North, Reading 1922, chap. 4.
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April 29. Pulp detectives (handout).
- Daly, “Knights of the Open Palm.”
- Hammett, “The Main Death.”
- Nebel, “Too Hot to Handle,” Dime Detective 14, no. 1 (September 15, 1934).
- Smith, Hard-Boiled, chap. 1.
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Special meeting: May 7, 12 p.m., MU 107. Getting weird (handout).
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Monday, May 25.
- Term paper due at 12 p.m.