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Course description:  A group of American writers whose first major works appeared in the 1920s was a generation “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”  Gertrude Stein labeled them the lost generation, and their works mirrored the extravagance and corruption that led to their disenchantment.  This course will explore the subjects and themes of the Jazz Age, the 1920s, as they are reflected in the literature of the time, and it will examine various exits from the wasteland suggested by post-crash authors.  Cather, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Toomer, Eliot, Faulkner, and Hurston are among the authors we will read.

For Fall 2021 we will use Canvas and our course website for background information on the works we are reading and for assignments, and we will come together in Zoom sessions each week at our scheduled class time for discussion of the material.  The tests will be “take-home,” and our exchange of ideas will be ongoing through Canvas discussion questions and responses.  I will be available throughout the semester for individual conferences through email, cell phone, or Zoom.

About this page: This page will host course-specific page links, documents, images, and contextual information related to authors and works being studied during the semester. It will contain information that supplements, but does not replace, the contents of Canvas and will be a platform that is, in many cases, more quickly and easily accessible than Canvas.

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COURSE TEXTS

1. Anderson, Sherwood        Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
2.  Cather, Willa                      The Professor’s House  (1925)
3.  Eliot, T.S.                            The Waste Land and Other Poems (1922)
4.  Faulkner, William              “That Evening Sun” (1931); “A Rose for Emily” (1930)
5.  Fitzgerald, F. Scott            The Great Gatsby (1925); “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931)
6.  Fitzgerald, Zelda                “Eulogy on the Flapper” (1922)
7.  Hemingway, Ernest           The Sun Also Rises (1926)
8.  Toomer, Jean                      Cane (1923)
9.  Hurston, Zora Neale.         “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933)

 

SYLLABUS

• Click here for 374 Course syllabus
  37401F21syl

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SCHEDULE OF ASSIGNMENTS

• Click here for 374 Schedule of Assignments for Fall 2021:
  37401schF21

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COURSE OUTLINE

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Sheet for Calculating Your Grade

• Click link below for 374 Grade Sheets for Fall 2021:
  Grade Sheets with Percentages

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Web Page Updates

(page last updated on 8.6.21)

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Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Sherwood Anderson (1876 – 1941) was born in Camden, a small Ohio farming town. After several moves the family settled in Clyde, Ohio, on which the fictional town of Winesburg in his best known book, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), is based. In his later life from 1935 Anderson lived in Virginia, and he is buried in Marion, Virginia. On his gravestone are the words “Life, Not Death, Is the Great Adventure.” Anderson was a major influence on many other American writers, including Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner, whose works we are reading in this class. For more biographical information click here or go to Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, ed. By Ray Lewis White (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1969).

(1) Winesburg, Ohio: Trailer for the Novel

(2)  Winesburg, Ohio: Outline for Discussion

Winesburg, Ohio Outline for Discussion Fall 2021

(3) Winesburg, Ohio: Audio Recordings Links (all below are Libravox recordings, in the public domain)

The Book of The Grotesque
Paper Pills
The Philosopher
(from Adventure forward you will need to click on the link, then scroll to the story)
Adventure
The Strength of God
The Teacher
Sophistication
Departure

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(1) The Waste Land: Trailer for Part One–The Burial of the Dead

(2) Structure Sheet
The Waste Land Structure Sheet

(3) Biographical Information on T.S. Eliot

(4) The Poem: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

 

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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), author of This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), and the unfinished and posthumously published The Last Tycoon(1941), appealed to two diverse audiences from the beginning of his career to the end: the popular magazine audience and the elite of the literary establishment. His short stories appeared regularly in the 1920’s and 1930’s in such mass circulation magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Hearst’s International, Collier’s, Redbook, and Esquire. The readers of these magazines early on came to ask for Fitzgerald’s flapper stories by name, expecting to find in them rich, young, and glamorous heroes and heroines involved in exciting adventures. Popular magazines in the 1920’s billed Fitzgerald stories on the cover, often using them inside as lead stories. Long after Fitzgerald lost the knack of writing the kind of popular stories that made him famous as the creator of the flapper in fiction and as the poet laureate of the jazz age, magazine headnotes to his stories identified him as such.

Those who recognized the more serious side of his talent as it was evidenced particularly in his best stories (“The Ice Palace,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and “Babylon Revisited,” for example) and his novels included Edmund Wilson, George Jean Nathan, H. L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, and T. S. Eliot, who offered criticism as well as praise. Fitzgerald was generous with advice to other writers, most notably to Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe; but also to struggling unknowns, who wrote to him asking advice and got it. Many of Fitzgerald’s critical opinions became public when he published his Crack-up essays in Esquire in the late 1930’s, his dark night of the soul. Regarded by some in Fitzgerald’s time as self-pitying, these essays are now often anthologized and widely quoted for the ideas and theories about literature and life that they contain. After his death and the posthumous publication of his incomplete The Last Tycoon, a Fitzgerald revival, still in progress both in the academic world and in popular culture, began. With this revival, Fitzgerald’s reputation as a novelist (principally on the strength of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night), short-story writer, and essayist has been solidly established. As Steven Vincent Benét wrote in a Saturday Review of Literature tribute to Fitzgerald after his death, “This is not a legend—this is a reputation. It may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”

(Adapted from Bryant Mangum, “Introduction to the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”  To read article click here: “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” The Critical Survey of Long Fiction.)

(1) The Great Gatsby: Trailer for the Novel

(2) The Great Gatsby: Outline for Discussion
Click here for outline for discussion

3)  The Great Gatsby: Structure Sheet
Click here for structure sheet

(4)  The Great Gatsby: Introductory Article (contains many points we
will cover)
Click here for introductory article

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The Professor’s House (1925)
by Willa Cather

Today Willa Cather is one of the most important American novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. Seen as a regional writer for decades after her passing in 1947, critics have increasingly identified Cather as a canonical American writer, the peer of authors like Hemingway, Faulkner and Wharton.

The eldest of seven children, Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia in 1873. When Cather was nine years old, her family moved to rural Webster County, Nebraska. After a year and a half, the family resettled in the county seat of Red Cloud, where Cather lived until beginning her college studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1890.

After her graduation in 1895, Cather worked as a journalist and teacher, living first in Pittsburgh and later in New York City. Her first volume of poetry, April Twilights, was published by a vanity press in 1903, and in 1912 she was able to leave editorial work and live as a full-time writer and poet….  As one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century, Willa Cather was gifted in conveying an intimate understanding of her characters in relation to their personal and cultural environments—environments that often derived from Red Cloud. Cather died from a cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947 and was buried in the Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire. Engraved on her tombstone is this quotation from My Ántonia: “that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” Willa Cather is the author of 12 novels, 6 collections of short fiction, 2 editions of her book of poetry, April Twilights, and numerous works of nonfiction, collected journalism, speeches, and letters.

(from “About Willa Cather,” The Willa Cather Center. For full article, click here)

1.  The Professor’s House: Trailer for the Novel

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The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Ernest Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon that “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you.” He might have added that most of his own stories and major novels if traced back far enough, also begin in death.  In The Sun Also Rises (1926), death from World War I shadows the actions of most of the main characters; specifically, death has robbed Brett Ashley of the man she loved before she met Jake, and that fact, though only alluded to in the novel, largely accounts for her membership in the lost generation. A Farewell to Arms (1929) begins and ends with death: Catherine Barkley’s fiance was killed before the main events of the novel begin; and her own death at the end will profoundly influence the rest of Frederic Henry’s life. The Caporetta retreat scenes, often referred to as the “death chapters” of A Farewell to Arms prompt Frederic Henry to give up the death of war for what he believes to be the life of love. In For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), death is nearby in every scene, a fact suggested first by the image of the bell in the novel’s title and epigraph, the bell whose tolling is a death knell. Perhaps most important in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan’s choice to die as he does comes from his reflections on the heroic death of his grandfather compared with what he sees as the cowardly suicide of his father. Finally, Santiago’s memories of his dead wife in The Old Man and the Sea (1952) play in and out of his mind as he confronts the possibility of his own death in his struggle against the great marlin and the sea.

In Hemingway’s work, as Nelson Algren observes, it seems “as though a man must earn his death before he could win his life.”  Yet what may appear to be Hemingway’s preoccupation–or, to some, obsession–with death should not obscure the fact that he is, above all, concerned in his fiction with the quality of individual life, even though it must be granted that the quality and intensity of his characters’ lives seem to increase in direct proportion to their awareness of the reality of death.  If the constant in Hemingway’s works is the fact that “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death,” the variable is his subtly changing attitude toward the implications of this fact, no better gauge of which can be found than in the ways his characters choose to live their lives in his major novels.

(Adapted from Bryant Mangum, “Ernest Hemingway.”  To read the article, click here: “Ernest Hemingway,” in The Critical Survey of Long Fiction.)

Trailer for The Sun Also Rises 

1. The Sun Also Rises Structure Sheet
2. The Hemingway Code and The Sun Also Rises Excerpt from Hemingway’s Novels

Trailer for Cane

Cane Structure Sheet: click here: Cane Structure Sheet

Cane: Organization of the Order for Class Discussion, Click here

Subjects and Themes in Cane: Chart.  Click here: Cane Chart

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