Studies in American Literature (471-0-20)

Topic

The American Modernist Novel, Black and White

Instructors

Julia Ann Stern
847/491-3530
University Hall Room 415
Office Hours: Mondays 1:1:50; Tuesdays 10-11; and Thursdays 12:20-1

Meeting Info

University Hall 018 English: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

In this seminar, we will closely read two great American novels, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Ann Petry's The Narrows (1954). You will be expected to read Faulkner's epic at least twice. But we will begin with Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon, the chronicle of her sociological engagement with America's last-living former enslaved person, Oluale Kossola. Hurston's non-fictional 1929 account, unpublished until 2018, features exclusively Black voices that tell the story of Africatown, Alabama's all-black community formed in the aftermath of the state's final foray into the illegal international trade in enslaved peoples, in 1861. We will juxtapose this ethnographic material with Faulkner's "historically" inflected fictional envisioning of a poor white boy's rise, through canny strategy, rugged charisma, and unspeakable ruthlessness, to the top of the slavocracy in pre-Civil War Mississippi. The novel then recounts Thomas Sutpen's inexorable self-destruction and the ruin of his dynasty in pursuit of a pure, white, family line soon after General Robert E. Lee's surrender. Faulkner's story is, arguably, the greatest and most difficult American novel of the first half of the 20th-century, featuring multiple narrators working across three generations and two regions, and influencing, among other luminous writers, Toni Morrison, who wrote her master's thesis on his work. Morrison has widely discussed how Faulkner influenced both her creative endeavors and her criticism. We will end the quarter with Ann Petry's magisterial The Narrows, which employs a very different modernist style from Hurston or Faulkner, reviving the Naturalism that marked American literature in the fin de siècle, but with a raced and gendered texture all its own. The plot features black male and white female star-crossed lovers, whose intellectual affinities and education make up for the racial divide from which each comes. Petry's use of free indirect discourse unfolds in a kaleidoscopic patterning and a characterological breadth that recalls Dickens as much as Faulkner. Her male protagonist, scholars say, is loosely based on Paul Robeson. Petry has largely been lost to classrooms, but our work this quarter seeks to remedy that. We will read additional assorted critical essays across the quarter, available in the Norton Critical Edition of Absalom, Absalom! and on Canvas.

Evaluation Method

Mode of Evaluation: Bluebook close reading Journal, in which you select a passage from the primary material not discussed in class and collected in week 4 and week 8.

Final Installation Project focusing on a material artifact described by either Faulkner or Petry, to be traced through a work of literature, and an historical archive, and a cinematic or televisual text, and in the popular culture of either 1833-1910 or the 1950s. For example: Charles Bon's New Orleans; Judith Sutpen's "wedding dress"; Link Williams' cigarette case; Camilla Treadway Sheffield's red convertible.