ENGL 208 - Twentieth -Century American Fiction

Institution:

University of Richmond

Subject:

Description:

Textual analysis of novels and shorter fiction representing diverse authors, themes, movements, and techniques. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course focuses on the thematic and formal developments of modern American fiction. Novels and short stories of the twentieth century catapulted American writers to the forefront of literary achievement, with figures such as Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein fashioning an entirely new kind of prose. Along with their counterparts in Britain - but often with a focus that was uniquely American - writers like these sought ways to express authentic experience authentically and to convey what was new about modern experience. This modernity was defined in a great variety of ways, including reactions to historical events such as World War I, rapid increases in urbanism and industrialization, the Great Migration of African Americans, women's suffrage and advancing professionalism, and the Depression (among others). These developments in turn prompted textual strategies that departed significantly from the straightforward realism or Victorian sentimentality of their forebears. Above all, authors of this period discovered the enormous wealth of experience and expressive capacity available to writers who focused on interior, subjective experience - the narrative of mental life that characterizes a great deal of modernist literature. Emphases in this course vary, and students may find themselves focusing on writers of a particular region, a certain literary school, or from a particular period of the twentieth century, such as post-World War II writers, the Civil Rights era and its aftermath, or postmodernism. Other writers may include Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Nathanael West, Truman Capote, Chester Himes, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Tim O'Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Bernard Malamud, or Cormac McCarthy.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.richmond.edu

Phone Number:

(804) 289-8000

Regional Accreditation:

Southern Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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