123250 AR Literature Course - Literature 1/2 (MA) American/North American Lit./Studies (2013W)

‘Race’ and ‘Gender’ are among the most powerful and persistent forces of social hierarchization in American culture. This course is concerned with the ways in which these forces play out in a selection of American novels written over the course of the twentieth century - a time during which ideologies of racism and sexism came under severe attack. Starting our survey with Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), written by an aspiring African American novelist to address matters of race and miscegenation by turning to the conventions of realist fiction, we will work our way across the twentieth century: by reading two modernist novels, Nella Larson’s Passing and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, moving on to Richard Wright’s highly controversial Native Son, written in the socio-critical spirit of the 1930s, and Tony Morrison’s postmodern slavery novel Beloved to close with Philip Roth’s Jewish-American take on the novel of passing in The Human Stain and Edward P. Jones’ post-postmodern take on the slavery novel in The Know World.