HONR 203: The US Experience

 “The Jazz Age”
Our topic will be the literature and culture of the Jazz Age, an era of rapid and profound social
change. The course will be interdisciplinary: we will cross over into music, film, and the visual
arts in order to study the culture of the 1920s more comprehensively, and to examine the
interaction among the arts as the age of modernism reached its peak. We will read works by
such authors as T. S. Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. E. Cummings, Eugene O’Neill, and Jean Toomer. Topics to be discussed
include the cult of the primitive; representations of race; the rise of the New Woman; high and
low culture; and the relationship of jazz to all these phenomena.