Prof. William Marling
wxm3@po.cwru.edu
216-368-2342
T: 4:30 - 7:00 p.m. Guilford 301
Jan 14 - introduction, NYC before modernism. HTML
session
Jan 21 - Exile's Return, Cowley. Overview of the
social movements, groups, areas of the city.
Reserve reading: "The Salons of New York," Robert
Crunden, American Salons.
HTML Session.
Jan 28 - The Village: e.e. cummings' The Enormous
Room. The "discovery" of Modernism.
Reserve reading: "E.E. Cummings and Dada Formalism,"
Dickran Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives. HTML Session
Feb 4 - Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: Edna St. Vincent
Millay, A Few Figs from Thorns. Reserve reading:
Epstein, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, pp. 121-54.
HTML Session?
Feb 11- Mina Loy, selected poems: Margaret Anderson
(editor, The Little Review): My Thirty Years' War,
pp. 35-117 . Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture.
Film clips from The Crowd and The
Jazz Singer. CLASS DINNER@ ??
Feb 18 - Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones (1920)
and Paul Robeson film The Emperor Jones (1933).
Reserve reading: "The Emperor Jones," Heywood Broun,
pp 144-46, in O'Neill and his Plays, eds.
Cargill, Fagin, Fisher; and Bogard, Contours in Time, pp. 130-50;
Floyd, The Plays of Eugene
O'Neill, pp. 1-20, 202-10.
Feb 25 - Stieglitz and 121: William Carlos Williams'
Spring and All. Reserve Reading: "Kora in Hell and
Duchamp" and "Dada Spring" in William Marling,
William Carlos Williams and the Painters.
Mar 4 - The Arensberg Circle: Wallace Stevens,
poems 1915-1921 (The Palm at the End of the Mind,
pp. 1-55. Reserve Reading: excerpt from Randall Collins, The
Sociology of Philosophies.
Mar 11 -spring break
Mar 18 - Visitor: William Faulkner: The Sound
and the Fury. Reserve reading: Joseph Blotner's biography
Vol. 1, pp. 317-26, 565-98. And Fred Chappell, "The Comic
Structure of The Sound and the Fury," pp. 213-33 in William
Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagoner-Martin
Mar 25 - Money: John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer.
Reserve Reading: A.C. Goodson, "Manhattan
Transfer and the Metropolitan Subject," and Townsend Ludington,
John Dos Passos: A 20th
Century Journey, pp. 200-249.
Apr 1 - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Reserve Reading: Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Modern
Times. "Seeing New York," pp. 85-108.
Apr 8 - The Algonquin Round Table: Dorothy Parker,
"Big Blond," "Arrangement in Black and White,"
A Telephone Call." and Death and Taxes (short poems). Reserve
reading: Marion Meade, What
Fresh Hell is This?, pp. 67-118.
Apr 15 - Harlem: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale
Hurston: selected writings. Reserve reading: David L. Lewis,
"Enter the New Negro," When Harlem was in Vogue.
Apr 22 - Jean Toomer: Cane. Reserve Reading: Jon
Michael Spencer, "Modernism in the Negro Renaissance,"
in Ludington, A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United
States.
Apr 29 - student presentations
May 6 - student presentations.
Requirements:
1. Close reading: due Feb. 25. Choose a poem or
passage of fiction (under 300 words) and analyze the technique
à style à theme. Limit of 1,000 words (4 pages).
Graded.
2. Link list: due Feb. 18. Annotated html page of on-line resources
about one of the authors, possibly the author you will be writing
about. To be up-loaded. Graded.
3. Map: your contributions to the NYC literary map page due
March 4.
4. Precis of a critical article: due March 18 (first class after
spring break). An exercise in condensation. You will select
a critical article on your author/topic and reduce it to 500
words, in consultation with the professor. Graded.
5. Bibliography: due April 1, for your web page. This will include
all the print sources on your author. Briefly annotated, for
uploading. Graded.
6. Paper ideas: April 8. 500 word description of your research
paper idea.
7. First draft of paper: April 22.
8. Presentations: April 29, May 6. 30 min. on your paper, 10
on your website.
9. Final paper and website: May 16. Graded.
On Reserve at the Smith Library
Bochner, J. and Edwards, J. American Modernism Across the Arts.
NX504.A545
Conrad, Peter. The Art of the City: Views and
Versions of New York. NX511.N4
Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa. NX550.Z9
Lewis, David. When Harlem was in Vogue. NX511.N4
Ludington, Townsend. A Modern Mosaic: Art and
Modernism in the United States. NX504.M584
Scott, W.B. and Rutkoff, P.M. New York Modern.
NX511.N4
Weber, Nicholas Fox. Patron Saints: Five Rebels
who Opened America to a New Art, 1928-1943. NX504.W4
