Courses / Module

The literature of the United States since 1900 reflects both national confidence and national anxiety. A nation of migrants is necessarily committed to interrogate its own identity and to redefine what “America” can and should mean in a changing world. This module will treat modern American literature in terms of representative hopes and fears, illustrating how a nation musing on the burden of its own exceptionalism examines the discrepancy between its own claims and its own experience. The immense military, economic and cultural influence of the United States carries with it a peculiar sense of impending hubris. The texts chosen will illustrate formal as well as thematic innovations in fiction, poetry, and drama showing how the need to tell unfamiliar stories requires literary forms to bend and adapt to the rhythms of new voices. A nation founded by a culturally homogeneous
community of white males has, since the beginning of the 20th century, struggled with varying degrees of success to make its project available to women and men from every conceivable cultural background. As a consequence, the American literary canon has long been in a state of continuous creative revision. In light of this extraordinary historical experience, students will be encouraged to consider what makes a text distinctively “American” and to consider the implications of the fact that America, like American Literature itself, is very much “a work in progress”.