Studies in American Literature (378-0-20)
Topic
The Jazz Age
Instructors
William J Savage
847/491-8916
1908 Sheridan Road, OUSA
Office Hours: By appointment
Meeting Info
Parkes Hall 215: Tues, Thurs 12:30PM - 1:50PM
Overview of class
In "Echoes of the Jazz Age," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that "it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. " During the cultural crisis of Modernism, when a variety of intellectual revolutions and the unprecedented carnage of the Great War suggested that Western civilization was either a sham or doomed, writers and other artists created new literary forms. Their aesthetic innovation often depicted art and love (or sex) as parallel (or contradictory) ways to create meaning the wasteland of Modernity. In this class, we will read and discuss canonical, lesser-known, and popular texts of ‘20s in order to explore how these revolutionary writers saw love and art in their own time and, maybe, in the future.
Teaching Method
Lecture & Discussion.
Evaluation Method
Participation in class discussion; short one-page responses to each text; plus a variety of options for critical papers, ranging from several short argumentative essays to one long research paper.
Class Materials (Required)
Eliot's The Waste Land, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, Fauset's Plum Bun, and Dos Passo's Manhattan Transfer, as well as short fiction by Kay Boyle, Hemingway, and poetry from e. e. cummings, and Herriman's Krazy Kat and Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area