ENG 336 - Early Twentieth Century Literature (1)

What was it like to live, love-and write-through WWI and its aftermath? What happened to literature and art as a result of that debacle? How did expatriate Americans in London and Paris, including African Americans, as well as British and French participants reinvent writing and invent film to grapple with the traumas and challenges to the end of culture as they knew it? H.D., Imagist poet, offers her lyrical and haunting memoir in Bid Me to Live. Hemingway shapes a fragmentary estranged world in In Our Time; Rebecca West in The Return of the Soldier, the French film director Abel Gance in J’accuse (filmed with soldiers on the front), and Richard Aldington in a searing faux journal witness the chaotic psychological wounding of soldiering and shell-shock. Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway and D. H. Lawrence in his paintings and in Lady Chatterley’s Lover portray the ongoing aftershocks of war and trauma and efforts to re-embrace life and love. Fire!!, the 1926 journal of the Harlem Renaissance, along with revealing articles of the day portray the heroism–and homecoming betrayals of–black soldiers leading to the Great Migration to Harlem, and explore the racial dynamics of expatriate Paris. We will screen key films: J’accuse, The Big Parade and others and examine paintings from the war zone. We’ll examine Trench newsletters, women in the war effort, and the concept of the “Temporary Officer/Gentleman” that emerged when the average life span of a Lieutenant at the front was only three months and speedy promotions were needed from the rank and file. Research projects may take shape as podcasts, broadsides, or other creative projects in addition to papers. Prerequisite: writing-designated course (W), or ENG 201, ENG 202, ENG 215, or ENG 225 Alternate years.
(Humanities)