English 624: The Roaring Twenties
Spring 1998
Dr. Mangum

I.    Book List:  Books will be available through the Carriage  House.
A.    Background and Reference (required texts)

The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade     Frederick J. Hoffman
Only Yesterday                                                              Frederick Lewis Allen

B.    Novels, Poems, Plays

The Professor's House                                                            Willa Cather
The Waste Land and Other Poems                                          T.S. Eliot
This Side of Paradise                                                             F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night                                                                F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms                                                               Ernest Hemingway
Babbitt                                                                                 Sinclair Lewis
Three Plays                                                                            Eugene O'Neill
Cane                                                                                     Jean Toomer
The Age of Innocence                                                               Edith Wharton
Additional works by                                                            Ezra Pound, Hart Crane,
                                                                                            Sherwood Anderson, William
                                                                                            Faulkner, and others

II.    Course Description and Objectives

"Ours was a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of those who, like himself, came of age in the 1920s, a decade he christened "the Jazz Age" and others celebrated as "the roaring twenties."  Ernest Hemingway, echoing Gertrude Stein, labelled the generation "lost," and catalogued the deaths of many of its illusions, chief among them, perhaps, the death of romantic love.  Within the celebrations of the decade's excesses and the mournings of its losses, American literature came into its full flowering in the twenties, witnessing major works by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, and Eugene O'Neill.  In this course we will read works by these authors, among others, and examine them in the context of the culture of the 1920s.

Our major objective in this class will be to acquaint ourselves with the contributions to American letters of many of the major writers of the time (mentioned above) through close reading and careful discussion of works written by them, viewing them in the context of the culture of the twenties.  Another objective will be to familiarize ourselves with the major source material--biographical, bibliographical, and critical--for these authors; and through the use of this material we will draw conclusions about the relationship of these authors to each other and to the time in which they wrote.

III.    Assignments

A.    Seminar Report #1:  a critical reception presentation (approximately ten minutes long) on one of the works under discussion on the day scheduled for the discussion of the particular work.

B.    Seminar Report #2:  a brief report (approximately ten minutes long) on a topic related to a specific work or to a cultural or historical event of particular importance in the twenties.  You will select a topic from a list that I will distribute.  This seminar report will lead to a short (3-5-page) paper which I will describe in more detail in class.

C.    3-5-page paper (note-length) in which you respond to a critical article (not a contemporary review) of the work on which you have given your critical reception report.  You will read at least three critical articles dealing with your work and select one as the foundation or springboard for your paper.

D.    15-20-page paper:  this paper will deal with some original problem (biographical, bibliographical, or critical) including a complete check of existing treatments of the problem by other scholars.  This is a documented, thesis-support paper, and we will discuss this more in the third week of class.

IV.    Grading:
a.    two oral reports and seminar participation: 15%
b.    two 3-5-page papers: 30% (15 % each)
c.    15-20-page paper: 55%

V.    Course Outline
A.    Preview:  The Temper of the Twenties: "The Love Song of  J. Alfred Prufrock" and
        from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly
B.    The War:  A Farewell to Arms
C.    The Lost World: The Age of Innocence and from Winesburg,Ohio
D.    The Very Young:  This Side of Paradise
E.    Forms of Traditionalism: The Professor's House
F.    Experimentation:  Cane and Strange Interlude
G.    Science and the "Precious Object": The Waste Land
H.    Critiques of the Middle Class: Babbitt
I.      Retrospective: Tender Is the Night (and "Echoes of the Jazz Age")

VI.    Office:  My office is 307 Anderson House (913 West Franklin  Street, and the telephone number (with voice mail) is 828-1255.  You may e-mail me at bmangum@saturn.vcu.edu

VII.   Daily Assignment Sheet to Follow