American Literature 1910-1940: August Frye

Day One: Introduction and Beginnings

2009-06-27T15:00:00.001-07:00

Precursors and the Start of the 20th Century

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson: Yawps, Asides
E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost: “The Sound of Sense”

The Modernist Project

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot: Imagism, Collage, “Make It New”

***

Poems by Whitman: "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," "Song of Myself," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Respondez!"

Poems by Dickinson: "I heard a Fly buzz," "To make a prairie," "Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!," "The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --," "After great pain, a formal feeling comes --," "Much Madness is divinest Sense --"

Poems by Robinson: "Luke Havergal," "Reuben Bright," "Richard Cory," "The House on the Hill," "Miniver Cheevy," "Eros Turannos"

Poems by Frost: "Design," "Fire and Ice," "Provide, Provide"

Poems by Pound: "In a Station of the Metro," "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter," "The Seafarer" (plus a McSweeney's parody of Pound)

Poems by Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," "Macavity: The Mystery Cat" (plus Wendy Cope's "Waste Land Limericks")

A bit more on Whitman and Dickinson.

Day Two: American Modernism

2009-06-27T14:59:00.002-07:00

Modernism Ascendant

Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore: Bric-a-brac
William Carlos Williams: The Armory Show, “The Mouths of Polish Mothers”
E. E. Cummings: Poetry, Painting

Ekphrasis

William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden: Looking at Brueghel

***

Poems by Stevens: "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "The Snow Man," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Study of Two Pears"

Poems by Moore: "Poetry," "The Wood-Weasel"

Poems by Williams: "Danse Russe," "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," "Spring and All," "To Elsie," "This Is Just to Say" (plus Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams")

Poems by Cummings: "Buffalo Bill's," "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls"

Poems by Auden: "As I Walked Out One Evening," "Epitaph on a Tyrant," "Musee des Beaux Arts"

Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

The 1913 Armory Show (plus X. J. Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase")

Day Three: Home and Abroad

2009-06-27T14:59:00.001-07:00

The Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jacob Lawrence, Jazz and Blues

The Lost Generation

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein: “Who Is Calling Who a Lost Generation?”

***

Poems by Hughes: "The Weary Blues," "I, Too, Sing America," "Harlem," "Sylvester's Dying Bed"

Poems by Dunbar: "We Wear the Mask," "To a Captious Critic," "A Negro Love Song"

Stories by Hemingway: "A Very Short Story," "Hills Like White Elephants" (plus six-word stories by Hemingway and others)

An essay by Fitzgerald: "The Crack-Up"

A section of a poem by Stein: Tender Buttons [Objects]

Day Four: North and South

2009-06-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker Crowd

Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, James Thurber: “To Be Thrown with Great Force”

Small Towns, Big Cities

Eudora Welty, William Faulkner: Fiction, Friction
Richard Wright, James Agee: Racial Redress, Photography
H. L. Mencken: The Sage of Baltimore
Delmore Schwartz: The Heavy Bear

***

Poems by Parker: "Resume," "Observation," "News Item," "Finis"

A short film by Benchley: "How to Eat"

An interview with Thurber: "The Art of Fiction"

A story by Welty: "Why I Live at the P.O."

A speech by Faulkner: Nobel Acceptance

A poetry sequence by Wright: "Five Haikus"

An essay about Agee: "A Famous Man"

A review by Mencken: "A Book for the Gourmet"

A story by Schwartz: "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (pp. 34-43)