Susan Edmunds's Recent Courses

ETS 181 (Fall 2003): Class and Literary Texts: Labor and Consumption in Modern American Literature; HONORS SECTION

This honors course examines U.S. literary texts drawn from two decades--the twenties and thirties--in which questions of class and culture gained unprecedented prominence in national, and intellectual, life. We read literary texts in the context of Karl Marx's and Pierre Bourdieu's theories of capital, paying close attention to their accounts of the differing ways in which the unequal acquisition of "economic capital" has affected the working-class in the sphere of production, and the unequal acquisition of "cultural capital" has affected the working-class in the sphere of consumption. We also read historical accounts of class-based cultural struggles waged in the early part of this century in both spheres. As we turn to literature, we study how U.S. literary texts represent class-based cultural divisions as they intersect with and engage other social divisions organized along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and national identity. Throughout the course, particular attention is paid to texts' ambivalent and unstable representations of the education system and of literature itself as they serve to maintain and/or critique U.S. class divisions. Students are expected to participate fully in class discussion and to conduct modest research projects on their own for class presentation. Texts include: Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children.

ETS 413 (Fall 2003): Studies in Period and Chronology: Modern American Literature

In this course, we examine a range of fiction drawn from the period between 1900 and 1945. Discussion will place the three major literary modes of the period--realism, naturalism and modernism--in a sociohistorical context. We try to understand how the larger social conflicts and social upheavals of the period prompted writers to become dissatisfied with inherited forms of literary representation and to devise new modes of representation which they claimed were more suited to bringing about–or protesting--social change. The social changes we consider include: increasing immigration, urbanization and industrialization and growing class conflict; the rapid expansion of a consumer-oriented society and resulting tensions between regionally and nationally based cultures of everyday life; African Americans’ “great migration” to the North and new models of anti-racist activism; and contestations over women’s social place and the rise of the “New Woman.” Authors include: Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, and Edith Wharton.

ETS 421 (Spring 2004): Studies in the History of Forms: The European Avant-Garde

This course has been designed to provide a context for other ETS courses I teach on Anglo-American modernism and twentieth-century American experimental literature, but it can be taken for its own sake. It offers an introductory overview of the divers movements and media of the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century. We will focus primarily on manifestoes, poetry, prose, drama and film, with a secondary focus on visual art and some sculpture. The course begins with Gertrude Stein and the Cubists, and then turns to the Italian Futurists, the Dadaists in Zurich, Berlin and Paris, the French Surrealists, and Russian Constructivism and Futurism. It concludes with the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht. Throughout the course, we will use our close investigation of avant-garde texts to examine arguments for and against the revolutionary import of key tenets of the avant-garde. These tenets include: the destruction of art's special status as a separate and elevated category of experience and the reintegration of art with the practice of everyday life; the refusal of artistic autonomy; the assault on the organic work of art in favor of the fragmentary, the contingent and the ready-made; and the promotion of an aesthetics of defamiliarization and shock, aimed at disrupting the recipient's adherence to the status quo. In our review of arguments critical of the avant-garde, we will pay particular attention to charges of its male-dominated and blatantly sexist history as well as charges of its eventual recuperation by the very bourgeois art market it set out to critique. Texts include: Stein, Tender Buttons; Breton, Nadja; Mayakovsky, Plays; Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

ENG 828 (Spring 2004): Advanced Seminar in Literatures and Cultures: The European Avant-Garde

This course has been designed to provide a context for other graduate courses I teach on Anglo-American modernism and twentieth-century American experimental literature, but it can be taken for its own sake. It offers an introductory overview of the divers movements and media of the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century. We will focus primarily on manifestoes, poetry, prose, drama and film, with a secondary focus on visual art and some sculpture. The course begins with Gertrude Stein and the Cubists, and then turns to the Italian Futurists, the Dadaists in Zurich, Berlin and Paris, the French Surrealists, and Russian Constructivism and Futurism. It concludes with the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht. Throughout the course, we will use our close investigation of avant-garde texts to examine arguments for and against the revolutionary import of key tenets of the avant-garde. These tenets include: the destruction of art's special status as a separate and elevated category of experience and the reintegration of art with the practice of everyday life; the refusal of artistic autonomy; the assault on the organic work of art in favor of the fragmentary, the contingent and the ready-made; and the promotion of an aesthetics of defamiliarization and shock, aimed at disrupting the recipient's adherence to the status quo. In our review of arguments critical of the avant-garde, we will pay particular attention to charges of its male-dominated and blatantly sexist history as well as charges of its eventual recuperation by the very bourgeois art market it set out to critique. Texts include: Breton, Nadja; Mayakovsky, Plays; Brecht, Caucasian Chalk Circle; Stein, Tender Buttons

ETS 116 (Fall 2004): Studies in Period and Chronology: Modern American Literature

In this course, we examine a range of fiction drawn from the period between 1900 and 1945. Discussion will place the three major literary modes of the period--realism, naturalism and modernism--in a sociohistorical context. We try to understand how the larger social conflicts and social upheavals of the period prompted writers to become dissatisfied with inherited forms of literary representation and to devise new modes of representation which they claimed were more suited to bringing about–or protesting--social change. The social changes we consider include: increasing immigration, urbanization and industrialization and growing class conflict; the rapid expansion of a consumer-oriented society and resulting tensions between regionally and nationally based cultures of everyday life; African Americans’ “great migration” to the North and new models of anti-racist activism; and contestations over women’s social place and the rise of the “New Woman.” Authors include: Marita Bonner, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton, and Anzia Yezierska.

ETS 412 (Fall 2004): Studies in Literary History: US American Postwar Fiction

This course offers a survey of postwar U.S. novels and short stories from the late forties to the mid-eighties. We interpret the fiction through a sociohistorical framework, with particular emphasis placed on investigating the interconnections between aesthetics and politics. Literary critic Paul Maltby has argued that in the postwar period an earlier leftist and/or avant-garde faith in Marxist programs of social change, which called for an overthrow of the material conditions of economic production, faded. In its place, a variety of activists and ordinary citizens began to identify language and culture as "the primary source of oppression and hence . . . the principal sites of protest and resistance."For a good part of the course, we examine the various ways in which literary texts of the period participated in formulating and substantiating this political thesis. After an initial survey of fiction written in direct response to World War II and its aftermath, we read literary texts associated with the Beat movement, the Black Power Movement, the Vietnam War, Second Wave Feminism and its (ongoing) critique by women of color, before ending the semester with Don DeLillo's tribute to postmodernism, White Noise. Texts include: Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five; Islas, The Rain God; Morrison, Tar Baby; Erdrich, Love Medicine; and DeLillo, White Noise

ETS 481 (Spring 2005): Studies in Race and Discourse: The Harlem Renaissance

This course examines the texts and contexts of the Harlem Renaissance. We read African American literary texts alongside newspaper journalism, memoirs, visual texts and historical and critical accounts in an effort to understand the social and political energies and tensions undergirding the cultural renaissance in Harlem during the 1920s. We investigate such topics as the competing attempts to define the “New Negro,” the role played by African American literary production in political struggles against black disenfranchisement, the role African-American culture played in contemporary struggles to critique and transform Anglo-American culture and cultural dominance, literary efforts to absorb and reconcile rural and urban forms of African-American expression, struggles over the relationship posed by white elites between “the modern” and “the primitive”and related struggles over the ongoing commodification of blackness. Assigned texts include: the 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, and Langston Hughes’ The Ways of White Folks.

ENG 793 (Spring 2005): Studies in Twentieth-century American Literature: The Harlem Renaissance

This course belongs to a set of graduate courses I teach on U.S. modernism and on the European avant-garde. It provides an in-depth introduction to the texts and contexts of the Harlem Renaissance. We will read African American literary texts alongside newspaper journalism, memoirs, visual texts and historical and critical accounts in an effort to understand the social and political energies and tensions undergirding the cultural renaissance in Harlem during the 1920s and its complex relationship to other modernist movements in the U.S. We will investigate such topics as the competing attempts to define the “New Negro,” the role played by African American literary production in political struggles against black disenfranchisement, the role African-American culture played in contemporary struggles to critique and transform Anglo-American culture and cultural dominance, literary efforts to absorb and reconcile rural and urban forms of African-American expression, struggles over the relationship posed by white elites between “the modern” and “the primitive”and related struggles over the ongoing commodification of blackness. In addition to a collection of a selection of shorter texts and articles, we will read the 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, and Langston Hughes’ The Ways of White Folks.

Fall 2005: On Leave.

ETS 420 (Spring 2006/ London): Cultural Production and Reception: The European Avant-Garde

This course offers an introductory overview of the divers movements and media of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Europe. We will focus primarily on manifestoes, poetry, prose, drama and film, with a secondary focus on visual art and some sculpture. The course begins with Gertrude Stein and the Cubists, and then turns to the Italian Futurists, the Dadaists in Zurich, Berlin and Paris, the French Surrealists, and Russian Constructivism and Futurism. It concludes with the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht. Throughout the course, we will use our close investigation of avant-garde texts to examine arguments for and against the revolutionary import of key tenets of the avant-garde. These tenets include: the destruction of art's special status as a separate and elevated category of experience and the reintegration of art with the practice of everyday life; the refusal of the idea of artistic genius; and the promotion of an aesthetics of defamiliarization and shock, aimed at disrupting people's attachment to the status quo. In our review of arguments critical of the avant-garde, we will pay particular attention to charges of its own attachment to everyday forms of male privilege and European imperial power, as well as charges of its eventual recuperation by the very bourgeois art market it set out to critique. Texts include: Mayakovsky, Plays; Brecht, Caucasian Chalk Circle; Stein, Tender Buttons.

ETS/ WSP 360 (Spring 2006/ London) : Reading Gender and Sexualities: Three Lives

This course brings together the lives and writings of three women who each left her distinctive signature on the development of modern literature. Virginia Woolf, born into a prominent Victorian family in 1882, grew up to become one of the leading figures of the Bloomsbury group, a coterie of writers, artists and intellectuals dedicated to developing new standards and new forms of everyday life. Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys both came to London as young adults. Mansfield, born into a wealthy colonial family living in New Zealand in 1888, eventually made a place for herself at the edge of the Bloomsbury circle, while Jean Rhys, born in 1890 to a colonial family of declining fortunes in the West Indian island of Dominica, traveled in the shadows of London’s demimonde. All three writers used London, as well as journeys to and from London, as the scene of their meditations on women’s varied experiences of modern life. Discussion will focus on how each writer brings distinct stylistic innovations to bear on the task of representing an urban world defined by interlocking relationships of gender, class, and empire. Texts include: Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, and Wide Sargasso Sea; and selected short stories, criticism and personal writing by all three women.