ENG 898 Sem: Jews & Southerners:20 Cent Am Literary & Intellectual History
This course examines two influential - though rarely paired - American groups: Jewish intellectuals- including Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Saul Bellow - and Southern literati- including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison. The literature, cultural writings and literary criticism of these two groups will be addressed.This course emphasizes competing regionalisms within intellectual culture, the Northeast and the South, on the one hand, and the urban versus the rural on the other. In addition, it scrutinizes the way in which abstractions, like literary modernism, have allowed minority groups to configure their relationship to the twentieth-century United States.