ENGL 3090 is also offered in Spring 2024
ENGL 3090 is also offered in Fall 2021
Spring 2024 | ENGL 3090 Section 001: General Topics -- Socialism & Twentieth-Century American Literature (67573)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 9 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Tue,
Thu 02:30PM - 03:45PM
UMTC, East Bank
Pillsbury Hall 114
- Enrollment Status:
Open (6 of 20 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics specified in Class Schedule.
- Class Notes:
- Socialism and Twentieth-Century American Literature explores the influence of socialist, communist, and Marxist ideas and sensibilities in modern American literature. For much of the middle of the twentieth-century, socialist politics, broadly defined, shaped the literary efforts of a wide range of writers, such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, and others. Arguably no other sociopolitical tendency has had such an animating impact on both canonical literary formations like modernist aesthetics, as well as on the representational and political expressive projects of marginalized groups and identities. In this course, we'll read explicitly pro-leftist protest works by a diverse range of writers from the 1930s Communist movement, like Richard Wright, H.T. Tsiang, Meridel Le Sueur, and Mike Gold. We'll trace the influence of socialism on the development of radical Black Power and Black feminist writing from the 1960s and 1970s. We'll also consider notable works of disenchantment or skepticism toward socialism, like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and late twentieth-century critical retrospectives of American involvement in leftist politics by novelists like Philip Roth and E. L. Doctorow. Today, as socialism has re-emerged in public discourse as a contentious and often struggled-over term, we'll examine the current correlation of leftist political discourse with contemporary American culture. In your writings for the course, you'll both conduct literary and historical analyses of works from US literary history and have the opportunity to explore how mainstream US culture today frames basic socialist ideas--class privilege, economic marginalization, working-class identity--in films and television shows like Barbie, BlacKkKlansman, The Menu, Knives Out, Succession, and The Americans.
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/67573/1243
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2024 English Classes