And Some Crosscurrents of Modernism
| Professor Robert
Dunne 318 Willard Hall 832-2756 dunne@ccsu.edu |
|
And Some Crosscurrents of Modernism |
|
|
Required Texts:
Anderson, The Egg and Other
Stories (Penguin)
---, Poor White (New Directions)
---, Windy McPherson’s Son
(U of Illinois P)
---, Winesburg, Ohio (Oxford
UP)
Faulkner, Mosquitoes (Liveright)
Hemingway, In Our Time (Simon
& Schuster)
---, The Torrents of Spring
(Scribner)
Excerpts from (handouts):
Anderson, Letters, "An Apology
for Cruelty," "New Orleans, the Double Dealer and the Modern
Movement in America," Memoirs
Dell, Homecoming
Dunne A New Book of the Grotesques:
Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Anderson’s Early Fiction
Faulkner, "Sherwood Anderson:
An Appreciation"
Hemingway, Letters, A Moveable
Feast
O Henry, "The Gift of the Magi"
Phillips, "Sherwood Anderson’s
Two Prize Pupils"
Toomer, Cane, Letters
On Reserve:
Dictionary of Midwestern Literature
(forthcoming)
Bernard Duffey, The Chicago
Renaissance
Robert Papinchak, Sherwood
Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction
Judy Jo Small, A Reader’s Guide
to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson (forthcoming)
Kim Townsend, Sherwood Anderson
COURSE OBJECTIVES
Sherwood Anderson’s career
as an author plateaued as the careers of other, more prominent writers
from the first half of the twentieth century were just beginning.
He is remembered in large part for helping launch the careers of Hemingway
and Faulkner, and yet his own works have never generated widespread critical
interest, except for Winesburg, Ohio. In this course we will focus
on Anderson’s life and representative works where they intersected with
the various intellectual and artistic currents of modernism; we will become
familiar with the Chicago Renaissance and the concept of the modern grotesque,
gaining a better understanding of what "serious" writers of the period
were rebelling against. We will also examine works by Faulkner, Hemingway,
and Toomer, to gauge Anderson’s influence on these writers. Throughout
the course we will also grapple with such issues as the American literary
canon, short-story experimentation, and the notions of Midwestern literature
and regionalism.
Assignments:
There will be two brief oral
reports: one will be a discussion of a scholarly source on one of Anderson’s
works (sign-up sheet forthcoming); the other will be a presentation of
your research paper in progress, to be scheduled within the last three
weeks in the semester. By brief I mean about 10-15 minutes, 20 minutes
for graduate students.
In addition, there will be
three 5-page critical papers and a major research paper (10 pages for undergraduates,
15 pages for graduate students). Two of the short papers may be on
any aspect of the works discussed in class; you will determine the due
date based on which work(s) you study. However, please submit these
papers no later than two weeks after the class discusses the work(s).
The other short paper will be a polished version of your oral report.
(Accordingly, this paper will be due no later than two weeks after your
report.) The research paper is somewhat open-ended: you may choose
to write in depth about any of the works discussed in class, you may investigate
other works by Anderson, you may address works by other authors who have
mentioned or who show some influence by Anderson, or ----?
You should begin to carve out a research topic just after the midterm point;
please feel free to talk with me about possible topics.
I will expect you to follow
the MLA Guide for Writers of Research Papers, 4th ed. for typing and documentation
format.
NOTE: I will expect that
any work which you submit will be your own: any evidence of plagiarism,
including the downloading of excerpts or entire documents from the Internet
will result in an automatic F for the course and possible suspension or
expulsion from the University. NO EXCEPTIONS WILL BE MADE.