ENG 448 - The Roaring Twenties

Semester Hours: 4

Gangsters, flappers, expatriates. Prohibition, jazz, cinema. These are just a few defining features of the decade that we now call “the Roaring Twenties,” a time marked by substantial urban and commercial developments in America. In this course, we will study how the literature of this period responds to the rapid modernization of culture with optimism and cynicism, faith and doubt, hope and despair. Authors whose works we’ll read include (but are not limited to) F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, and August Wilson. We will also study several musical and film texts, including the jazz of Ma Rainey, Fletcher Anderson, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong, and films such as The Gold Rush and Chicago.