Short Course Description
This seminar will focus on novels published during the interwar period (1918-1939). Often dubbed the "modernist" phase in American literary history, this period saw an explosion of literary innovation, as young novelists began experimenting with new forms of expression. From Ernest Hemingway's clipped, hard-boiled style to William Faulkner's baroque, grandiloquent rhetoric, modernist formal experimentation challenged established notions of literary form and cleared new paths for the novel. Thematically too post-WWI iconoclasts broke with earlier conventions, and explored themes of violence, alienation, racial discrimination and poverty with new urgency and force.
Often bewildering, at times frustrating, always demanding, the writers on our syllabus had transformed American literature.
Full syllabus will be available to registered students only