Summer Course Offering

We are pleased to announce that our department will be offering a summer course in 2024, taught by Professor Jean Lutes.

Registration for Summer 2024 opens on March 14th!

ENG 9640 – 020: The Modern American Novel

CRN: 11087

Professor Jean Lutes

Summer 2024, Session II 7/1/24 - 7/29/24

MTWR from 11:00 am to 01:20 pm in St Augustine Ctr Liberal Arts 110.

This course studies significant works of American fiction written in the first half of the twentieth century and considers how writers responded to the sweeping changes that characterized modernity in America. As we chart modernism’s emergence, we will look both backward and forward, discussing how writers extended and challenged nineteenth-century literary traditions, as well as how they anticipated the concerns of our own historical moment.  We will open the term with the study of an award-winning 2017 novel rooted in nineteenth-century U.S. history, as a bridge between our twenty-first century moment and the hundreds of years of literary history that continue to reverberate in our own times. Likely texts are Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied, Sing (2017), Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939).