12/25/2023 0 Comments Ragefueled memoir affairThere are questions that intersect between the form and the content in every single novel that we read. Are they abandoned? Are they embellished? Are they stretched? Are they rejected? What happens to those resources that the great modernist writers endowed language with so powerfully earlier in the century? So there are formal questions that we will take up time and again. So one of the things we're going to think about together in the course is what happens to all those innovations. In the second half of the twentieth century and up now into the twenty-first century, writers were thinking very hard about what to do stylistically with all the innovations that come in that powerful period known as modernism. It's also going to be the process of watching an artistic form unfold over a very exciting period of time. I see slavery.Īll these things you can read about in these novels, but reading these novels is not just about reading about those things. I see women who give up on housekeeping altogether and let their house go to ruin and become vagrants. There is a nervous breakdown that actually happens right here in New Haven in one of these novels. There are questions of identity and race. I see love, in all kinds of guises: be they criminal as in Lolita, pedophiliac love be they sort of ideational romantic, John Barth be they campus love, that's The Human Stain, Philip Roth all kinds and forms of sex and love, and then there is politics interweaving with all those things. I see war, all the way from the Trojan War, to the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, all the way up to the Vietnam War. So when I look down at my list of novels-which I have not brought with me (I trust you can find it on the web I didn't want to kill trees by making enough of these for all of you)-when I look down at my list of books and I think about what these books are about, I see war. This includes a whole range of thematic concerns. My goal in this course is to allow you or to invite you to read some of the most compelling novels written in the last little over a half century. Make yourself comfortable on the floor if you can. It just makes the whole thing work a little easier and it prevents that drop in the pit of my stomach when I see half of the class leave. I would be grateful if you would wait until that point if at all you possibly can. In between those two parts, I will ask that anyone who is shopping the class and would like to leave at that time do so then. In the second half of class, I will introduce to you and start telling the first story of the term, and that's about Richard Wright's Black Boy, which is our first reading of the term. In the first half of class, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the class and introduce some of the questions that we will think about over the term if you stay in this course. Today I am going to do a couple of things. Professor Amy Hungerford: This is "American Novel Since 1945." Welcome. The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 1 Transcript
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