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.


ENG 630-2: U.S. Modernism: Prose and Poetry/ Fall 2006

Course Description: This course offers an introduction to modernist writing in the U.S. Emphasis will be placed on the reading of primary texts in the context of shifting critical arguments and paradigms. We will begin by contrasting old and new critical accounts of the modernist emphasis on difficult form. The older account, provided by Lukacs, condemns the modernist tendency to reject time-governed narrative structures in favor of "spatial organization," aesthetic experiment and self-reflexivity. In this account, modernist writers refuse the political and ethical task of socio-historical engagement. The more recent account, provided by David Harvey, argues that modernist texts, in their emphasis on difficult form, confront as such a crisis of representation intrinsic to the experience of modernity. In this way, they take up the task of socio-historical engagement more fully and with more insight than their realist predecessors and contemporaries. With these arguments in hand, we will turn to an array of U.S. texts caught up in numerous social conflicts and new collective ventures of the early twentieth century. I organize the syllabus by three formal innovations important to U.S. modernism--fragmentation and montage, the representation of consciousness, and literary transcriptions of the American vernacular--before turning to a final section that poses the question "Is it Modernism?." Within each section we will read fiction and/or poetry in conjunction with critical essays that look to a given text’s aesthetic form to understand the nature of its socio-historical engagement. Areas of social change and social struggle that we’ll be discussing include: the betrayed legacy of Emancipation and the fight for racial justice; sexual revolution, gender emancipation and women’s suffrage; capitalist expansion, labor radicalism, and the ethical role of the state; new animosities and cross-fertilizations between high art and mass culture; massive immigration, migration and the pro-nationalist bid to forge a distinctly "American" voice. Modernist texts are usually difficult; class participants should be prepared to take a scholarly approach and to work hard.

Required Texts :
Eliot, The Waste Land ; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Toomer, Can ; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Dos Passos, The Big Money; Stein, Three Lives; Williams, Paterson Yezierska, Bread Givers; West, The Day of the Locust

ETS 410-02: Twentieth-Century U.S. Experimental Fiction Spring 2007

Course Description: This course looks at U.S. experimental fiction written under the influence of European avant-garde experiments and in the absence of a collective avant-garde movement in this country. Our major focus will be on anti-narrative and anti-realist fiction that both criticizes and poses alternatives to mainstream conventions of fictional representation. We will explore the relationships writers have posed between literary, scientific and social experiments as they have sought to identify and overturn the rules of signification and the order of existing communities. The main emphasis will be on the fiction itself, but we will also read theoretical and historical accounts of the concept and practice of experimental writing. This course is not for everyone. Experimental writing is designed to offend and usually does so in one of three ways: by being obscene, opaque, or extremely boring. Some texts manage to be obscene, opaque and extremely boring all at the same time. Please do not take this course if you have doubts about your commitment to the material.

Required Texts
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; William Burroughs, Naked Lunch; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee; Adrienne Kennedy, In One Act

ETS 118-01: Survey of American Literature II: Modern American Literature//Spring 2007

Course Description: In this course, we will examine a range of fiction written between 1890 and 1945. Discussion will place the three major literary modes of the period--realism, naturalism and modernism--in a sociohistorical context. We will 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 will consider include: increasing immigration, urbanization and industrialization and growing class conflict; African Americans' "great migration" to the North and new models of anti-racist activism; contestations over women's social place and the rise of the "New Woman"; and the rapid expansion of a consumer-oriented society and resulting tensions between regionally and nationally based cultures of everyday life.

Required Texts
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg,Ohio; F.S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby ; Meridel Le Sueur, The Girl; Richard Wright, Native Son

ENG 630: Twentieth Century U.S. Southern Literature (Fall 2007)

Course Description: This course introduces participants to several things: one version of the canon of twentieth century Southern literature; past and current states of the field of Southern studies; and basic conventions and requirements for writing and publishing works of literary analysis in the profession today. The course begins with a glance at past configurations of the field of Southern literary studies and then moves to an overview of current attempts to reconfigure and expand that field as the “New Southern Studies.” Key to this shift is the displacement of a focus on identity, nationalism and regionalism, and history, in favor of a focus on border-crossings, the local and the global, and geography. This displacement is upsetting or upending earlier arguments about Southern exceptionalism as the complexly shared histories of the U.S. and (other) global Souths claim more and more critical attention. In the main body of the course, we read a range of literary and documentary texts that entered the canon of Southern (literary) studies at different moments in time (some have always been in this canon; others are middle-aged and some are new arrivals). Assigned critical essays place these texts in various socio-political contexts. Throughout the semester, class discussion will foreground the global circuits traced within stories about the U.S. South and explore the global reach of stories --and ways of telling stories--about the region.

Required Texts:
Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature
Erkine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men
Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café
Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow
Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge

ETS 310 (sect. 3): 20th Century Southern Literature (Fall 2007)

Course Description: In this course, we will read fiction written in and/or about the U.S. South,
concentrating on the period beginning with the "Southern Renaissance"; in the late twenties and thirties and going up through the present. An essay on the constructed nature of "the South"; as a real and imagined territory will start us off. Then we will turn briefly to important literary antecedents in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Chesnutt, before focusing on fiction of the twentieth century. Class discussion will focus on the complex relationship between aesthetic form and sociohistorical crisis, struggle, and change. We will examine aesthetic modes and categories associated with the gothic, the grotesque, the folk, the pastoral and the vernacular and on “Southern” character types ranging from white trash and the black folk to the doomed aristocrat, the conjure woman, the sexual queer and the freak. And we will relate these aesthetic and literary concerns to larger patterns of historical disruption and development. Throughout the semester, we will pay particular attention to recent critical efforts to understand the production and academic study of Southern literature in a global context. For those interested in a firsthand look at this new scholarship, you can go on-line through Bird Library and browse the December 2006 issue of American Literature (Vol. 78, no. 4): Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies. (http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/content/vol78/issue4/)

Required Texts:
Erksine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men
Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café
Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow
Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge

ETS 310-2: Literary Periods: US American Postwar Fiction//Spring 2008

Course Description: This course offers a survey of postwar U.S. novels and short stories from the late forties to the mid-nineties. We will 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 will 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 will read literary texts associated with or influenced by the counter-culture, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights, Black Power and AIM movements, and Second Wave Feminism. We’ll end the semester with a series of novels that focus on the position of racial and ethnic minorities in contemporary U.S. society.

Required Texts (Available at the Orange Bookstore, Marshall Street Mall):
Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man
Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Morrison, Tar Baby
Erdrich, Love Medicine
Lee, Native Speaker

ETS 119 (5): Topics in U.S. Literary History: Fictions of U.S. Regionalism (Writing Intensive)/ Spring 2008

Course Description: This course introduces students to various fictions of U.S. regionalism. We will begin with the surge of popular interest in regional fiction in the late nineteenth century and follow the genre through struggles over regional identity and geographic and social place that occurred in the twentieth century. As we move through the semester, we’ll move through both space and time. The first section, on New England, will focus on turn-of-the-twentieth-century texts. The middle section, on the South, will focus on texts from the middle decades of the twentieth century, and the last section, on the West, will focus on texts written in the last decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the course, we will examine how the movements of peoples in and out of regions as well as new forms of trans-regional (and transnational) market and media connection have both solidified and threatened the historical and mythic status of the nation’s regional identities.

This is a writing intensive course. A focus on learning to interpret literary texts will go hand and hand with a focus on building skills of written argument. Through weekly immersion in these discipline-specific activities, the course will familiarize students with the more general thought processes, structures, and styles associated with writing in the liberal arts.

Required Texts (at the Orange Bookstore, Marshall Street Mall): Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Faulkner, The Bear; Toomer, Cane; Erdrich, Tracks; Kingston, China Men; McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses; Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus.