American Literature after 1900

1. Social movements such as Feminism, Socialism, and Communism in the early twentieth century U.S. spawned a variety of politically engaged artistic expressions, including visual art, dance, theater, fiction and poetry. Focusing on poetry, please analyze the development of politically engaged literature at this time, making specific reference to the major aesthetic and thematic preoccupations of at least three poets.

2. Locate Genevieve Taggard in the context of Modernism and discuss her work in comparison with one American Modernist poet. Do the writers see Modernism in similar, different, or complementary ways?

3. In the twentieth century, writers of diverse identities like Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Erdrich have struggled to articulate the complexities of their particular experience in American culture. Focusing on three or four writers who integrate the problem of self-definition into their work, discuss their resistance to mainstream cultural identities based on race, class and/or gender. What different perspectives do they seek to bring to American literature and/or culture?

4. Recent scholars have recovered much lost writing by women, and consequently, have begun to redefine literary movements and American literary tradition more broadly. Early twentieth-century American women writers sometimes diverged from their male counterparts in significant ways as they attempted to develop an aesthetic of their own. Consider the question of whether or not they initiated what we might call a “feminine aesthetic,” and discuss how that aesthetic is articulated and elaborated.

5. Many of the fiction writers on the twentieth-century American list focus on money: its absence, its uses, its abuses, and its problems. Select three writers and discuss how each handles the subject. What similarities and/or differences do you see in their representation of money matters?

6. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot devises his influential theory of “impersonality” in poetry: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” First, offer a reading of this theory as a response to romanticism. Then go on to consider the ways in which modern poetry might be understood as a tension between or a dialogue between, impersonality and personality—or objectivity and subjectivity. Discuss at least four poets in your response.

7. From a letter of Wallace Stevens to his soon-to-be-wife, Elise Moll: “I sit home o’nights. But I read very little. I have, in fact, been trying to get together a little collection of verses . . . Keep all this a great secret. There is something absurd about all this writing of verses; but the truth is, it elates and satisfies me to do it. It is an all-round exercise quite superior to ordinary reading. So that, you see, my habits are positively lady-like.”

Steven’s rhetoric, by turns self-deprecating and defensively proud, points to the ways in which the writing of poetry is intertwined with issues of gender-identification. Devise a course for undergraduate English majors in which the syllabus is governed by an investigation of gender issues in 20th-century American poetry. Provide a brief rationale for text-choices, indicate governing themes and areas of investigation for the course, and then, using two poems, illustrate how such an investigation might incorporate in class-discussion and close reading.

8. It is a commonplace of modernist scholarship that poetry of the twentieth century may be read as a response to cultural chaos and psychological breakdown, and examples of both are not hard to find. a) Begin by demonstrating the utility of this thesis. As with other governing theses, the dominant narrative we tell about a period may also itself shape the canon we study and teach. b) Discuss the ways in which the “breakdown” thesis privileges some poems and poets and marginalizes others. Use a range of examples from earlier and later in the century. If (and only if) time allows, offer another possible thesis by which one might organize a study of the poems of this period.

9. While many theorists of American literature (e.g. Lewis, Chase) have looked at characters like Natty Bumppo or Billy Budd to suggest that the typical American protagonist has no relation to the past, many characters in twentieth-century drama are committed to an idealized version of the past. Consider how the past haunts Blanch DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, and Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, paying particular attention to how their attempted escape into an idealized past leads to their destruction in an all too real present.

10. Although Richard Rodriguez’s The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk differ in many respects, DuBois’s concept of the color line and Rodriguez’s concept of affirmative action share several significant characteristics, as do DuBois’s conception of double consciousness (“the veil”) and Rodriquez’s distinction between the public and private spheres. Focusing on these parallelisms, discuss these texts in relation to one another.

11. Traditional notions of the bildungsroman are characterized by mobility and individualism. Many women and writers of color, however, are reinterpreting the genre by placing more emphasis on community and replacing mobility with self-narration as a means to development. Discuss this proposition as you examine Brown Girl, Brownstones; The Woman Warrior; and The House on Mango Street.

12. Fred Hobson, in his monograph on contemporary southern literature, The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, argues that the southern writer in the postmodern era is not usually a postmodern writer.

That is to say, the contemporary southern writer—with a few exceptions—
essentially accepts, rather than invents, his world, is not given to fantasy, does not in his fiction question the whole assumed relationship between narrator and narrative, does not question the nature of fiction itself. The contemporary southern fiction writer, although he or she may experiment with time sequence and point of view in more basic respects, plays by the old rules of the game.

Choose three works of contemporary southern fiction to use as reference in an essay that addresses Hobson’s assertion. If you disagree with Hobson, discuss postmodernism in southern literature, using those writers who have been reluctant to warm to postmodern questions. Explore cultural, literary and historical angles to explain the post-Renaissance southern writer’s ambivalence to this major literary development.

13. The technical concept of “voice” has been increasingly central to the fiction and poetry of women writers in the twentieth century. Explore the notion of voice as a literary device in the work of women poets and fiction writers. (Please choose one poet and one fiction writer from before 1945, the other two from contemporary examples.) You might consider the following points. What are the political and cultural implications of voice-driven fiction and poetry by women? Why have women writers tended to favor voice as a technical means over other literary techniques? (Please pay particular attention to your definition of the term “voice,” and be sure to compare and contrast the ways in which your latter examples have shaped or refined the notion of voice offered by earlier women writers.)

14. Using Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” as well as the work of one fiction writer and one dramatist, discuss the techniques of literary modernism as a reaction to social and cultural changes in American society since the First World War. How did modernist technical and formal innovations—e.g., fragmentation, structure, syntax, and representations of time—embody thematic responses to the shifting fabric of American culture?

15. You have been asked to design a course focusing on representations of manhood and virility in twentieth century fiction, poetry and drama. Choose the texts you would include for this course, and write a rationale explaining your choices.

16. Toni Morrison argues that 20th-century American literature takes much of its theme and certainly its energy in the implicit “other” presence of African-Americans. Choose three works, at least one by a Southerner and one by a non-Southerner that explore how the sometimes hidden black presence affects the narrative and themes. If you wish, one of the books you discuss may be concerned with another ethnic minority.

17. Explain Henry Adams’ concept of “the Dynamo and the Virgin.” In particular, what is it that Adams values in pre-1900 Western civilization (as represented by the Virgin) and what is it he fears in a post-1900 Western civilization (as represented by the dynamo)? Then apply his concept of the Dynamo to two of the following works, showing how it helps explain each work: The Red Badge of Courage, The Hairy Ape, and Why Are We in Vietnam.

18. Lowell, Berryman, and Jarrell, contemporaries who knew one another well and who suffered variously from emotional instability, are regularly grouped together as post-World War II American poets with much in common artistically. Write an essay in which you explore this notion. Is it illuminating? Glib? What goals, ideas, themes, and techniques did the three poets share? Does seeing them as a group seem problematic? Why or why not?

19. Write an essay discussing The Little Foxes, Death of a Salesman, and Fool for Love as critiques of modern American society.

20. Use (and define for your purposes) the concept of intertextuality to discuss at least four 20th-century texts. You may choose to use the intertextuality of film and literature.

21. What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Wallace Stevens
“Sunday Morning”

The question posed by the speaker of Stevens’s poem is a frequent refrain of modernist poetry. Discuss the problem of religious belief in twentieth-century American poetry. What mutations and transformations occur in the representation of the sacred? To what other consolations and rituals do the poets turn? Use the work of no fewer than four poets to illustrate your argument, paying attention both to the overt subject matter of the poems and to the poetic techniques employed to depict the emotional and intellectual demands of the search for some form of, or substitute for, divinity.

22. Even a cursory review of major works of American prose fiction reminds us that twentieth-century American writing contains a great deal of sexual energy (though in the early part of the century the energy may be simmering in the subtext). Sex rarely, however, culminates in the traditional comic ending of a festive wedding: instead, sexual liaisons are often in some way illicit and result in a variety of unfortunate outcomes, from psychological or physical damage to murder to suicide. Discuss the depiction of sexual energy in American fiction, offering some persuasive speculations regarding the often-negative treatment of the subject. Include in your discussion at least one writer from the early part of the century (Wharton or Adams), at least one from mid-century, and at least one from the post-1945 period. As time permits, you may wish to address yourself to the question whether the treatment of sex is affected by the gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity of the writer.

23. Using what you have learned in your study of the numerous experimental techniques we associate with modernism (whether in poetry or prose), first discuss the ways in which evidence of modernist innovation makes its appearance in 20th-century American drama, even in drama that at first glance may appear “realistic.” Second, consider in turn the ways that modernist techniques in American drama might be said to prepare the ground for more overtly experimental drama, as for example the work of Samuel Beckett or Caryl Churchill.

24. One of the most cherished of American assumptions is that of self-determination: in theory, at least, each American is free to pursue life, liberty and happiness unfettered by any limitation other than his or her degree of ambition and desire to succeed. In practice, American novelists have often seen matters otherwise: in fiction, particularly, American writers have presented an array of obstacles to self-determination, ranging from economics to race to gender to, in the case of naturalism, genetic predetermination. Selecting at least five works of fiction discuss the treatment of the problem of the “self-made” person in American fiction of the twentieth century. Take care to select works that range across the century from the earlier to the later periods.

25. So clichéd is the notion that 20th-century writing is often propelled by feelings of alienation that we may forget its root in the word alien—the sense of the speaker as feeling “foreign” or “strange” wherever he or she is. Employing the works of at least three poets and at least three dramatists or fiction writers discuss the quality of estrangement or alienation in American literature. Additional instructions: 1) where possible consider not only the themes, but also the ways that the techniques of the poetry, play, or fiction create the feeling of estrangement; 2) be certain that you write substantially about at least three poets.

26. One of the legacies of the Puritanical heritage of America is discomfort with the body. Discuss the treatment of the physical body (pain, pleasure, sexuality, ugliness, beauty, aging, etc.) in poetry and drama of the twentieth century. A thorough answer will treat a minimum of four writers.

27. Discuss 20th-century American literature as a cacophony of signifying racial, gendered, and multicultural voices, especially in the later decades.

28. In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Stephen Crane impressionistically signals America’s expanding industrial and spiritual frontiers through a convergence of the railroad and marriage, which force men to put aside their boyish games and begin to catch up with a maturing country. Examine how this hopeful, 19th-century perception of American progress expresses itself in modernist and post-modernist texts. Does America actually grow up?

29. Discuss 20th-century American literary innovation, perhaps by examining how events inspired poets, novelists, dramatists, etc. to create new techniques and forms.

30. Extremely violent European explorers and their Euro-American slaveholding descendants established a country obsessed by the belief that persons of color could not equal white-skinned people. How do writers portray such a heritage of racial preference and privilege in its 20th-century beneficiaries? Will these characters prevail amidst the overwhelming majority of colored peoples in a 21st-century dominated by a global economy?

31. Memory and remembering become dominant themes in modern American texts by authors such as Erdrich, Morrison, and Faulkner. Why?

32. What constitutes religion in 20th-century American literature? Who is God? Where can God be found?

33. Marianne Moore believed that “poetry watches life with affection.” Use this as the basis for an essay on modern American poetry that considers Eliot, Stevens, and one of two of the following: Frost, Williams, Ransom, Hughes.

34. Some of our works (such as Native Son, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man, The Hairy Ape, A Streetcar Named Desire, Dutchman) feature a kind of “monster” as protagonist. This monster often dwells, Grendel-like, in a cave-like place, the underbelly of society, or rises out of the primal ooze of the underclass. The monster is often a tortured person who challenges and threatens the existing order. Write an essay in which you explore the dynamics of the “monster” archetype in Native Son, The Hairy Ape, and one other work. What are the racial and class implications of this archetype? How is the monster monstrous? What causes his/her monstrosity? Whom and why does the monster threaten? What is the monster’s fate?

35. Modernism is usually conceived as an international—even anti-national—movement. Exile, alienation, and expatriation abound. And yet many modernists—William Faulkner, for example—seem especially bound to a specific region or place. Write an essay in which you examine the intersection of modernism and regionalism in three writers (any genre).

36. Even as one trend of modern literary form has been toward classism and “objectivity,” another has moved toward romanticism and “subjectivity.” The cult of the author has emerged powerfully in the twentieth century. Select two writers, one a poet and the other a writer of prose (fiction or nonfiction), whose “personae” infuse, inflect, or otherwise influence their work, and analyze the role the “author” plays in relation to the literary text(s) he or she produce(s).

37. Historically, the frontier has played an important role in the development of American mythology. The connotations of the frontier are immense: it is the boundary between nature and culture; the boundary between two forms of culture; the place one goes to escape civilization; the place one articulates one’s dreams; the place new cultures are dynamically formed and, in many cases, displaced. The literal frontier had mostly vanished by the turn of the century, but the frontier as concept continues to play a major role in 20th-century literature. Select and analyze three works in which the frontier (broadly conceived) figures prominently, making whatever comparisons or contrasts you find appropriate.

38. In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Houston Baker argues that black writers mastered white literary forms, and then (in many cases) “deformed” them as an act of political protest. Whatever the individual merits of Baker’s argument, it seems clear that literary form often obtains political resonance. Select three minority writers and analyze how the form of their work intersects with its political content (broadly conceived).

39. Can 20th-century southern poetry be distinguished from American poetry or other regions? If so, what characteristics besides local place, names and details mark it off? Do these characteristics in themselves guarantee aesthetic interest or are they merely incidental? Would a contemporary poet willingly identify himself or herself as “southern”? Why or why not?

40. In “The Sleepers,” Whitman famously writes: “I am the actor, the actress, the voter, the politician,/The emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box,/He who has been famous and he who shall be famous after to-day,/The stammer, the well-form’s person, the wasted or feeble person.” The fragment foregrounds Whitman’s characteristically utopian, all-inclusive poetic gaze; his goal is to depict a generous panorama of America. But numerous 20th-century writers have shown how society fails to fulfill this utopian promise. Growing out of this frustration is an entire literary type: the misfit, the outcast, and the rejected. Discuss specific strategies for developing this type in at least three or four authors.

41. Address the interplay of economics (financial and social standing) and gender in three or four of the following writers: Dreiser, Wharton, Fitzgerald, O’Neill, and Mamet. Suggest how this interplay evolves from the early twentieth century to our time. What changes? What remains unchanged? What general patterns can one identify in the writers’ treatment of these issues?

42. Absence, void, disappearance, and death—either individual or collective—form major components of modernist aesthetics and core motifs of modernism’s poetic imaginary. Discuss these motifs in appropriate social-cultural contexts with reference to three or four poets. How do race and gender inflect the representations of such themes? How do they bear on the depiction of subjectivity and community, on how poets see history, society, tradition, and their crises during the first half of the twentieth century?

43. Modernism attempted to substitute aesthetics—and aestheticism—for religion following the nihilistic upheavals in philosophy and among the avant-garde around the turn of the century. However, religious themes are deeply lodged in both modern and postmodern works. Some critics have even argued for a return of religious sensibility in the late twentieth century. Analyze this sensibility and its repression or triumph in two modern and two postmodern writers. Finally, consider if and how it might be possible to use the representation of religious/theological issues to suggest a way of differentiating between modernism and postmodernism.

44. While current scholarship has in many ways re-defined what modernism was (or at least complicated the narrative of what “counts” as a modernist text), anthologies and histories of modernism continue to assert that an identifying attribute of 20th-century American writing is the search for some paradigm that would take the place of religious orthodoxy. Clearly there is convincing evidence to this effect: Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” is one case in point. However, it may also be argued that this rejection of “belief” is overstated and that various kinds of spirituality—orthodox and otherwise—substantially affect the ideas and experiments of the century. Make the case that spirituality can furnish a useful approach to the study of twentieth century American writing: select no fewer than two poets, one fiction writer, and one dramatist for consideration.

45. Your background in medieval literature has acquainted you with the quest-narrative. Writers continue to employ this form in the twentieth century. For example, an early and fruitful way of reading Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was to view it as shaped by the story of Parsifal (Percival). You need not write about that particular poem if you don’t wish to. Choose a minimum of three works from two genres to discuss the ways in which the structures and themes of the quest appear in 20th-century American writing.

46. Discuss the ways in which the categories of class could be employed in teaching the following writers:
• W.E.B. DuBois or Willa Cather
• Zora Neale Hurston or Maxine Hong Kingston
• John Steinbeck or F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Edith Wharton or John Cheever

Choose any three writers and devise a strong unit on the role of class in American fiction.

47. The following works explore, among other things, the subject of “marriage.”

Lowell “To Speak of Woe That is in Marriage”
Pound “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
Rich “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”
Wharton The House of Mirth
Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
O’Neill Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Albee Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Choose one novel, one poem and one play and discuss how marriage functions in the work: does marriage act as a symbol, a plot device, a metaphor, a means of discussing historical issues of class or gender, some combination of all these possibilities? In short, explore marriage as a topic of 20th-century American literature.

48. In “Modernism and Its Difficulties,” Richard Poirier suggests that a modernist text might be defined by the reading practices it encourages: “a good way to identify modernism is as a special kind of reading habit or reading necessity.” His description seems especially appropriate for those poems and fictions normally thought of as “experimental.” Selecting no fewer than two poets and two novelists, discuss the reading practices these experiments require or encourage.

49. As Women’s Studies programs have developed, they have increasingly become Gender Studies programs as well. (The renaming of the program at UNCG is one sign of this development). Assume that you have been asked to teach a course on masculinity in 20th-century American literature. It is to be sufficiently challenging to interest junior and senior English majors at a liberal arts college. Select the texts (you must include at least one play on the syllabus); provide a rationale for the reading list (i.e., why these texts?); and discuss two or more thematic approaches you would use to make the course coherent.

50. In “The End of the Line,” Randall Jarrell argued that modernism was not new, not a “violent” break with romanticism, but was instead “an extension of romanticism, an end product in which most of the tendencies of modernism have been carried to their limits.” Could one make a similar argument about the relationship between modernism and postmodernism? What tendencies of modernism could you argue have been carried to their limits in postmodernism? To illustrate your points, draw from both poetry and fiction.

51. 20th-century Jewish American and African American literatures have drawn characteristically from the defining experiences of the Holocaust, slavery, anti-Semitism, racism, migration, and immigration—from ethnicity and race more broadly. But as the century wears on more and more authors are questioning the traditional representation of such topics and the public expectations fostered by this representation. With modern and particularly postmodern “ethnic writing,” things get more and more complicated, and some critics have argued that we have reached a true crisis as an increasing number of Jewish American and African American writers debate the premises and formulas embedded in their traditions. Using at least two Jewish American and two African American writers, write an essay where you address these authors’ “critiques” and “reinventions” of their traditions. In particular, answer the question: Has this effort produced a body of literature significant enough to back up an argument for a “postethnic” turn?

52. Design an upper-division undergraduate course focusing on the “spectacle of memory” in 20th-century American literature. Make sure your course covers not only fiction but also drama and possibly poetry. In your answer, address issues and questions such as: What would the core texts/authors be, and how would you shape the syllabus as to include both canonical and less recognized works by authors of various backgrounds? How would genre difference play into your project? What is the relation between memory, recollection, “personal” (Roland Barthes) or autobiographic discourse, on the one hand, and subjectivity and “identity formation,” on the other? Finally, how would you integrate your students’ personal narratives, background, etc. and the personal narratives (readings) they would have to deal with? What would your pedagogical approach be like? Present the readings, the requirements, the assignments, and related matters.

53. “Modernist writing,” Malcolm Bradbury writes, “has a strong tendency to encapsulate experience within the city, and to make the city novel or the city poem one of its main forms.” Using a range of examples from American literature (both fiction and poetry) and confining yourself to texts written between 1900 and 1970, discuss ways that city spaces have informed the American literary imagination in the twentieth century.

54. Devise a genealogy of 20th-century American poetry: what are the schools or groups normally referred to in literary history? What are the recognizable and typical forms of those groupings? Who influences whom? Who resists whom? You may find that a “family tree” structure works for your argument; on the other hand, you may prefer the metaphor of a “web” of influences or some other device. Use a method of explanation that would be appropriate for junior-level English majors. Tempting as it may be to draw your answer, we must insist that your responses be in prose.

55. While many of the influential artists associated with modernism insisted on a hierarchy in which art was a superior activity for superior people and thus above crass commercialism, those same artists were inevitably participants in a consumer economy. The material realities of publishing and selling works of literary art have been, in fact, the subject of a number of recent and influential books. Discuss, using no fewer than four examples from poetry, drama, and fiction, the proposition that art is a form of labor and thus not in a special category separate from other modes of human labor. A number of approaches could be reasonable here: biographical, historical, formal, thematic, Marxist, etc.

56. Literary modernism arose in direct dialogue with experimentation in the arts, and the American letters are no exception. Write an essay where you focus on this dialogue in American modernism and postmodernism, with an eye to the most significant developments from Stein’s generation to Powers’. Identify the main artistic forms or models that have impacted 20th-century American literature and exemplify this influence by drawing from two modern and two postmodern authors of your choice. Your response must include a poet.

57. During a recent reading on the Duke University campus, Don DeLillo told his audience that he personally thought that he did not have much to learn from his readers and critics, nor generally from scholarship on his work. On the other hand, reading, reception, audience, public response generally are among his novels’ most prominent, indeed obsessive, themes. Using works by at least four American writers and from genres including poetry, fiction, and drama, discuss the treatment of these themes across the century, trying to identify the overarching patterns and tendencies, in particular the major changes brought about by the rise of metafiction in the late 60’s.

58. One of the recurring problems of American literary history is the problem of political art—the potential tension between polemics and aesthetics. And yet political art, hardly a precise category, might potentially include any text this side of the Pre-Raphaelites. Select a group of three texts that you feel represent some range of "political literature" (for example, the range between a specifically or topically political text and a broadly or generally political text), and write an essay in which you compare and contrast your works in light of the tension involved in "political art." In what sense (if any) are these words complementary; in what sense (if any) are they mutually exclusive?

59. The opposition—and indeed the chronology –of modernism and postmodernism is a fraught issue subject to any number of criticisms, reductions, and distortions. Select three texts that are normally classified as modernist or postmodernist and explore both how these labels work and how they don’t work. How are these labels useful, and how are they potentially distorting? If you like, you may also discuss why this opposition is so prevalent and durable despite the numerous criticisms lodged against it.

60. The policing and discipline of sexual desire is a constant in human culture. For this reason (among others) sexual relationships often absorb larger cultural or historical "themes." The clerk and the typist in Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” for example, are often read as representative of the cultural sterility documented in that poem. Write a comparative essay organized around three texts that contain sexual relationships (loosely defined; you might consider, for example, Brett and Jake in The Sun Also Rises, despite the impossibility of intercourse in that instance) that obtain broader cultural or historical resonance. You must use at least two genres.

61. "American literature after 1900" includes a multitude of texts by immigrants, expatriates, international cosmopolitans, minorities with a tenuous or oppositional relationship with the US—a broad range, in short, of writers who complicate and/or enrich the understanding of what American literature is (and what’s "American" about it). Write an essay using at least three writers from at least two of these groups (and you may include others) in which you meditate on the meaning of "American literature." Is this still a useful category by which to organize texts?

62. In his discussion of the novel, Mikhail M. Bakhtin noticed decades ago that this particular narrative form continued to develop and evolve as a genre. Bakhtin also pointed out that this evolution entailed incorporating and transforming other genres, cultural forms, and discourses. Write an essay in which you discuss this evolution throughout post-1900 American literature. Pay attention to how the novel’s generic status and makeup change, to the most important stages of this change, and to how (at least two) different ethnic traditions reflect it.

63. You have to put together an undergraduate, upper division course on the rhetoric of “the American dream” in 20th-century American literature. Present the approach, the focus, and the reading list (which must include poetry, fiction, and drama). How would you shape this course? Which would be its main components (thematic, historical)? What theoretical materials would you use, and how would you teach the primary readings? Keep in mind that your syllabus must list both canonical and less-than-canonical works, male and female writers, mainstream and minority, who both celebrate and critique the American dream. Describe at least two different writing assignments you would design for this course.

64. Not only have modern and contemporary American literature and culture increasingly shown interest in technology, representing it variously, but the object of representation, technology itself, has also shaped its own portrayal in poems, novels, plays, and sitcoms. Write an essay in which you show how technological developments have left their mark not only on the themes but also on the evolving styles of literary and cultural expression in the US after 1900. Make sure your discussion includes poetry and prose, as well as drama while also addressing the issue in relation to the transition from realism to modernism and postmodernism.

65. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man can be read as a search for identity. But at the end of this search, the symbolically unnamed narrator discovers that the notion of "finding" an identity in America is absurd. At the same time, this quest for identity in Ellison's novel launches many connections with Emerson's work. The narrator's search ties, if critically, into Emersonian individualism and its complex ideology. Address the dialogue with this ideology in Invisible Man and other works by at least three of the following authors: Willa Cather, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Toni Morrison, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo. Pay attention to the cultural-historical context shaped by race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as to style, to continuities no less than to changes. Make sure you include poetry in your discussion.

66. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and William Gibson's Neuromancer are often cited as science fiction novels. Explain the meaning of this term then try to ascertain the difference between these works and the more "mainstream" fiction of Paul Auster, Richard Powers, Michael Cunningham, Don DeLillo, Andrei Codrescu, or other contemporary authors whose texts are not considered genre specific yet make use of science fiction techniques.

67. Design an upper-division undergraduate course focusing on the "spectacle of memory" in 20th-century American literature. Make sure your course covers not only fiction but also drama and poetry. In your answer, address issues and questions such as: What would the core texts/authors be, and how would you shape the syllabus to include both canonical and less recognized works by authors of various backgrounds? How would genre differences play into your project? What is the relation between memory, recollection, or autobiographic discourse, on the one hand, and subjectivity and "identity formation," on the other? Describe the readings, the requirements, the assignments, and related matters.

68. Present briefly Genette's definition and use of the notion of the "palimpsest," then apply it to at least three 20th-century American authors from your list: one prose writer, one poet, and one playwright. Show not only how they produce their palimpsests through allusion, borrowing, and other intertextual plays but also how these are more than just plays, that is, how they are ways of engaging with a range of cultural and political discourses such as race, gender, and sexuality. Be specific in your response. Discuss how your writers use their palimpsest-like texts to inscribe themselves into the American literary and cultural tradition as well as to challenge it.

69. Incorporating at least one example from poetry, drama, and prose, write an essay in which you discuss the representation of the American Dream in 20th-century American literature. This issue cannot be addressed by ignoring its intertextual underpinnings: most contemporary writers, whether critical or appreciative of the American Dream/social Darwinism narrative, tell it essentially by re-telling it, that is, by revisiting previous works that have, since Benjamin Franklin, formulated this typically American story. Thus, in your response, pay attention not only to how contemporary writers represent the American Dream, but also to how they represent—rework, parody, critique, etc.—previous representations thereof. Remember that merely a series of close readings of individual works will not do. In your essay, also underscore the main directions, approaches, and tendencies, and place them in the appropriate social-historical contexts.

70. Design a course in literature that provides a survey of “modernism” for English majors. How would you define “modernism” and what texts would you select to illustrate the conception of modernism that shapes our course? What would you want your students to understand about “modernism” at the end of the course? Is “American” a useful category in considering modernism? Be sure to include examples from fiction, poetry, and drama, and provide a rationale for your selection.

71. How does gender affect the representation of racism in works by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker? You might think about these authors’ work in relation to work by African-American men like Wright, Ellison, and Reed.

72. Critics agree that Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and White Noise are representative “postmodern” novels. In the context of Pynchon and DeLillo, what does this mean? What is “postmodern” about these two novels? Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony were published roughly contemporaneously with Lot 49 and White Noise. Are these novels “postmodern” too? Why or why not?

73. Despite Nietzsche’s pronouncement of God’s death at the end of the nineteenth century, many modern and postmodern American writers have used Christianity and other religious belief systems as a central component of their work. Without trying to trace (in a narrative way) the role of religion in 20th-century American writing, select at least three writers who use religion differently in their work, and write an essay in which you compare and contrast the uses of religion in the three writers. Your essay should (at least broadly) consider the relation between religious beliefs and texts (dogma, theology, sermons, sacred texts) and literary ones: what is religion doing in a novel, play, poem, etc.?

74. Despite occasional (and sometimes sustained) efforts to keep “high” culture separate from and uncontaminated by “low” culture (mass culture, pop culture, what have you), the boundaries between the two have always been permeable, perhaps increasingly, as the last century progressed. Select three writers on your list and analyze their incorporation of “low culture” into “literary” texts (you may wish to meditate on the usefulness of these terms). Your essay should develop comparisons and contrasts between the ways in which your writers incorporate or use low culture.

75. The theme of tradition giving way to modernity is a common one in modern American literature, probably because this transition is so flexible that it can potentially describe almost any cultural shift. According to Slavoj Zizek, however, tradition is always a post facto construction: it doesn’t appear (at least it isn’t salient) until it’s gone. Write an essay in which you compare and contrast the work of three writers who describe a threshold or transition between tradition and modernity (however these are conceived). Is tradition a retroactive “construction” or a social reality that has actually been lost? Your essay should broadly address the uses of tradition for your writers and their works.

76. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen characterized history as “the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” a point of view roughly reproduced in Faulkner’s assertion that the past “isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past.”  Alternatively, Fredric Jameson suggested that “an active, lived relation to history” is one of the casualties of postmodernity.  Using three works, write an essay on history’s anxious presence—as either inaccessible or inescapable—in modern American literature. 

77. The shift from high modernism to the poetry of the mid-century period is often characterized as a shift from an impersonal poetics to a more personal poetics grounded in confession.  Using three poets, write an essay in which you consider the validity of this account.  In the poets you consider, what is the place and the role of the “personal” and the “impersonal”?

78. Although the digital age has focused attention on the existence of fantasy and virtual “worlds,” the novel itself, from Don Quixote forward, can be seen as a prototype of virtual reality and/or fantasy.  (In a similar way, many critics of video gaming call attention to its fundamentally narrative structure.)  Select three works (not necessarily novels) that create “worlds” fundamentally different from one their authors lived in—you may be creative in how you interpret that difference—and explore how the virtual worlds so generated detach themselves from and attach themselves to “the real world.”

79. Twentieth-Century American literature is awash in labels—of movements (e.g. “Harlem Renaissance”), regionalist literatures (“southern literature”),  styles (“postmodernism”), ethnic- or race-based groupings (“Asian-American literature”), and so on.  Select two texts or authors that you know well that are often classified as part of a larger group of texts, then write an essay in which you analyze the benefits and/or costs of this classification.  In what ways is it useful to consider these texts as part of a larger group?  In what ways might this classification produce distortions or oversimplifications? 

80. In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx calls attention to an American habit of viewing technology as intrusive and disruptive of an organic order.  At the same time, from the Model T to the iPod, Americans since 1900 have been compelled by technologies that promise pleasure, gratification, and material progress.  Using three works from your list, analyze the contradictory values—dystopian and utopian, good and bad, pleasurable and painful—that accumulate around technology in modern American literature.

81. You have been asked to design and teach a course called “Representations of Native America.” The new course will replace a course called “Native American Literature.” How might the two courses differ? What questions would the new course address? What texts would you select for the new course and why? (Provide specific examples.) How might the second course build on the first course? What formal aspects of the texts will you emphasize? What pedagogical strategies would you employ to help students understand the role of literary culture in the construction of “Native America”? You may draw on texts from both your 20th-century American Literature list and your Native and Women’s Voices List to answer this question.

82. In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, critic Houston Baker argues that Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk represent two crucial strategies for African-American modernists. Whereas Washington’s autobiography “masters form” by using the conventions of Anglo autobiography to represent Washington’s experience as a black man in the U.S., Souls “deforms mastery” by creating a new, hybrid form that puts African-American culture into dialogue with the “masters” of Western culture. Does this model work as a lens for thinking about the relationship between the literary productions of any minority culture in relation to the majority culture? For example, in what ways have ethnic American writers “mastered form” or “deformed mastery” in their writings? If this model doesn’t work, what do you suggest as an alternative? In order to support your claim, you will need to draw on specific examples from literary texts, analyzing their formal structures as well as their themes. In your discussion, include examples from at least four authors.

83. Interracial protagonists figure prominently in a variety of twentieth-century American novels. Focusing on three or four novels, explain how each represents the interracial individual in relation to his/her community. What function does interracial identity play in each novel? (You may include brief examples from more that the three or four on which you focus.)

84. Ezra Pound famously advised artists to “make it new.” Write an essay comparing and contrasting three innovators among American poets after 1900. How has each poet made it “new?” Support your argument with discussion of individual poems.

85. Emerson asserted that history consists of the “biographies of a few great men”—representative men, as he called them in another essay. In contrast many works of literature are organized as the biographies of a few representative families, great or otherwise. Write an essay in which you explore the “representational” function of three families in three texts. What makes these families literarily useful in exploring broader social or historical themes? Your three choices should include at least one novel and one drama.

86. According to Arjun Appadurai, the idea that modernity places “locality” under siege is “one of the grand clichés of social theory stretching back to Tönnies and Durheim.” Select three literary texts that dramatize a division between local environments and broader ones, and write an essay in which you analyze how the idea of locality works in the texts you’ve chosen. How do local environments allow the literary exploration of more “global” concerns?

87. The speaker of Eliot’s The Wasteland famously shores fragments against his ruins. According to one critic, this moment embodies literary modernism’s understanding of reality as “discontinuous until the intervention of art.” Write an essay in which you test the idea of art (which you may interpret broadly as either a set of textual strategies or as an activity performed by “artist-characters” within literary worlds) as generating order in a disorderly world against three modernist texts (possibly including The Wasteland).
88. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is just one of the major texts on your post-1900 American literature list dramatizing the complex notion of social visibility. Pick three other works from the list and discuss this problem in the literature of the past hundred years. One of these three works must be either poetry or drama. They must also cover at least three different ethnic or racial traditions. Your essay must also answer the broader question: what patterns, directions, or larger developments do you see emerging in post-1900 literature as you study this problem more closely? 
89. Discuss the dynamic of nation and “nativism” (the notion of being “native” of a place) in four works of your choice from the post-1900 American literature list. At least one work must be from the first half of the century (and you must include other genres beside narrative). To what extent national representation has revolved around issues of nativity or native origin and what changes in this representation do you notice as you move closer to the late twentieth-century? 
90. Drawing primarily from authors like Claude McKay and Karen Tei Yamashita (plus two authors of your choice), write an essay in which you discuss the incremental “tropicalization” of post-1900 American society and culture. Remember the literal as well as metaphorical meanings of tropos/tropikos (“change,” “trope,” but also “morphing,” “creolization”). What are the main “tropisms” the U.S. as a nation has gone through over the past one hundred years according to your discussed examples? 
91. From Eliot’s “Waste Land” to DeLillo’s Underworld, post-1900 American literature has been obsessed with a certain “cultural ecology,” that is, with a critical recycling of tradition (of the past generally) as a way of moving forward. Write an essay that identifies, in four works of your choice, this multiply symbolic preoccupation. Two of the works must be from the first half of the century. One of the works must be Underworld. 
92. Of modernist poetry, Ezra Pound famously said, “Make It New,” while T.S. Eliot contemplated how the “individual talent” engaged “tradition.”  From avant garde movements to African-American signifying, the anxiety of influence—and perhaps, as well, the pleasure of influence—has recurred as a major concern of modern and postmodern writing.  Using three texts from at least two genres, write an essay in which you explore the different models/practices of influence and innovation found in the texts you select.

93. Using one of the master terms of 20th century American literary history, write an essay in which you consider the usefulness—and perhaps the lack thereof—of the term in relation to three texts that it arguably describes.  A partial list: modernism, postmodernism, realism, Harlem Renaissance, expressionism, Imagism, confessional poetry, neo-classicism.

94. Tolstoy famously wrote that while all happy families were alike, all unhappy families were unhappy in their own special way.  Your reading list includes a number of works about conspicuously unhappy families.  Select three and write an essay in which you (a) describe and analyze the particular unhappiness afflicting the families in question, and (b) mediate on how and why the family continues to constitute a crucial site and scene of more broadly social and/or political critique.

95. If, as Anthony Appiah suggests, “culture” is the name for the “gap between us here and them there,” the spatial dimension of culture has, as Arjun Appadurai (among others) has shown, deteriorated under a regime of globalization and David Harvey’s “time-space compression.”  Put simply, cultures don’t map onto space as neatly as they used to.  Using three texts, write an essay in which explore the problematic of space in modern American literature.  In what sense(s) does coherent space deteriorate?  In what sense(s) does space survive as an inevitable epistemological category? 

96. One crucial difference between Whitman and Dickinson can be described in terms of size wherein the former’s the sprawling, grandiose, exuberant efforts to write the Great American Poem stand in stark contrast to the latter’s private, local, elliptical, and condensed efforts to capture fleeting moments of experience.  Without uncritically reproducing the implicit hierarchy of small and big, write an essay in which you compare the work of two “big” writers and two “small” writers.  How and why does size matter?

97.  It has often been noted that Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts” (Poetry, 1913)—a document that has become central to the study and teaching of the period—is symptomatic of a distinctly modernist fascination with taboo, deprivation, and negation.  From Eliot’s The Waste Land and Stevens’s “The Snow Man” to Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole” an entire tradition of twentieth-century writers seem determined to follow the path of negation, void, or cancellation into a mystical or secular silence.  Choose three writers and discuss the forms and aims of their commitment to negation.  What challenges does this commitment face?  What stylistic strategies does it provoke?

98.  When Stevens claims that “Poetry…must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns,” he implies that the demands of the mind for the spiritual and the transcendent must be satisfied, with or without God.  Choose at least three poets writing after 1945 and discuss the spiritual or transcendent—which is not necessarily to say the religious—dimension of contemporary American poetry.  You may want to consider how the poets either embrace or develop alternatives to conventional religion; how transcendence underwrites their ideas about art and reality; how contemporary visionary poetry incorporates aspects of spiritual traditions.

99.  “Only those who have personality and emotions,” Eliot writes in his deeply ambivalent discussion of the “impersonal” elements of poetry, “know what it means to want to escape from these things.”  Discuss the value of personality—and its relationship to art—in at least three twentieth-century poets.  You may want to consider whether personality is viewed as an expression of interiority or an act of mimicry; whether it’s considered a badge of authenticity or a sign of sentimentality and weakness; whether conventional ideas about personality and personhood still apply and how; and whether impersonality implies objectivity and emotional detachment.

100.  Twentieth-century fiction is distinguished by an increasing self-awareness and reflexivity, an ironic willingness to engage and critique the parameters of its own conventions.  Do you agree with this claim?  If so, what is the end-point of this increasing reflexivity?  If not, what authors offer alternatives to this mode of ironic self-awareness?  You may want to consider the differences between modern and postmodern fiction in this regard; the stylistic innovations that either interrupt or exacerbate this intense self-awareness; or the cultural and political stakes of an art that takes itself and its conventions as its primary subject.

101.  Expressionism, a movement that began in Germany before World War I, denotes the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional and expressive effect.  The expressionist writer accomplishes his/her aim through distortion, exaggeration, and fantasy.  The Adding Machine, Desire Under the Elms, Death of a Salesman, and Dutchman all make use of expressionistic techniques.  Write a well-organized essay discussing three of these plays in terms of expressionism.  You might wish to consider why the playwrights use expressionistic techniques (e. g., social and historical context, the particular themes being dramatized).

102. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) sociologist Georg Simmel suggests that the modern city profoundly and permanently changed the ways that the human mind works. Though modernism is often considered a metropolitan phenomenon and thus a symptom of those changes, it’s clear that writers like Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and even sometimes T. S. Eliot were also committed to envisioning how pastoral and rural landscapes can balance or complement urban spaces. Discuss the relationship between the urban and the rural or pastoral in at least three twentieth-century writers. What conventions and idealizations are at stake? Does an artist’s commitment to the city or the country affect his or her choice of style and formal strategy? Address at least one poet in your answer.

103. In a 1933 lecture, T. S. Eliot famously argues that “the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.” Choose three twentieth-century writers and discuss how each expands the aesthetic possibilities of modern literature beyond the circumference of conventional beauty to include the dull and the horrid, the repulsive and the boring, or other aspects of experience not often considered as themes for art. What sorts of stylistic choices must each author make because of his or her commitment to this aesthetic expansion? Address at least one poet in your answer.

104. William Carlos Williams declares, “No ideas but in things!,” and Ezra Pound advises the literary apprentice to “go in fear of abstractions” and become, first and foremost, an expert observer. As McFarlane notes, both “precise and detailed observation” and “the painstaking collection and collation of data”  were fundamental to the development of early modernist aesthetics. Drawing upon the work of three poets, discuss the conceptual intersections between modernist poetry and American Pragmatism as it appears in the work of Charles Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead, and others. Be sure to address not only how poetry is influenced by pragmatism but how it may challenge, alter, or transform tenets of pragmatic thought as well.

105. Twentieth-century fiction is distinguished by an increasing self-awareness and reflexivity, an ironic willingness to engage and critique the parameters of its own conventions. Do you agree with this claim? If so, what is the end-point of this increasing reflexivity? If not, what authors offer alternatives to this mode of ironic self-awareness? You may want to consider the differences between modern and postmodern fiction in this regard; the stylistic innovations that either interrupt or exacerbate this intense self-awareness; or the cultural and political stakes of an art that takes itself and its conventions as its primary subject.

106. James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus imagines history as a “nightmare” from which, he says, “I am trying to awake.”  Engagements with history as, broadly speaking, a nightmare—as trauma, as wound, as deprivation—are common in modern and postmodern American literature.  Select three such works and write an essay in which you compare and contrast their literary approaches to history.

107.  As a touchstone of literary modernism, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is predominately set in an urban landscape referred to at one point as “Unreal city.”  And yet it has its natural settings as well.  Similarly, Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises moves back and forth between urban and rural settings.  Using The Waste Land and at least two other texts, write an essay in which you meditate on modernism’s portrayal of the relationship between the city and the country.  Is modernism predominately an urban aesthetic?  Does it convey pastoral longings?  Given the broad nature of this question, feel free to generate a more specific thesis and argument within its general parameters. 

108. W. E. B. Du Bois famously predicted that the problem of the 20th  Century would be the problem of the color line.  For many writers, that problem has proven to be a literary opportunity: characters on the boundaries of racial and ethnic categories—characters who pass, for example, or second-generation immigrants who aren’t “Chinese” or “Korean” in ways that their parents are—have often provided a rich means of exploring the nature of race and ethnicity. Select three such works and write an essay that explores the implication of characters that uneasily inhabit racial or ethnic identities.  Your essay should develop comparisons and contrasts.  

109. The Nashville Agrarians bemoaned advertising and “personal salesmanship” as the twin pillars of an artificial industrial economy that sought (as they saw it) to create an unnatural desire for goods.  Write an essay in which you consider literary treatments of advertising and/or salesmanship as defining features of American economics and culture. 

110. Is literary modernism a reaction against realism or an extension of it?  Use two texts from each movement to explore this question.  Your essay should, at some point, meditate on the nature and usefulness of such labels.   If you like, you can substitute "modernism" and "postmodernism" for "realism" and "modernism."