120070 VO Literatures in English (2011S)

The lecture course will consider the evolution of a major strand of American fiction, the city novel, which paralleled the unprecedented growth of cities through mass immigration and internal migration and the development of suburbia as a typical American phenomenon.
The course will analyze and contextualize a number of significant books from William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) onwards, and will pay special attention to the novels of the 1920s. They will be represented by excerpts from important novels such as Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence – with its retrospective representation of an earlier New York – and from Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt – with its depiction of a commonplace reality.
In the seminar the rendition of the Jazz Age in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the avant-garde achievement of John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer will be discussed in detail. The course will also survey segments from realist, modernist, and post-modernist fiction, and analyze chapters from fiction rendering ethnic ghettoes as, for instance, in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1951) and from Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. It will eventually deal with aspects of the “city of words” further developed in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.