This course spans a critical era in American literature, beginning with antebellum and Civil War poetry, entering the 20th century, and traversing the transformative Modernist era. This course begins with the Poetry of the American Civil War and the series of major events and social movements that followed it—including Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, and Manifest Destiny, to name just a few. Encountering such poets as Herman Melville, Julia Ward Howe, Walt Whitman, Edward Arlington Robinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Emma Lazarus and W.E.B. DuBois, we will examine the language of patriotism, pride, violence, loss, and memory inspired by the Nation’s greatest conflict. As we enter the 20th century, we will encounter Modernism, a movement that spanned the decades from the 1910s to the mid-1940s, and whose poetry marked a clear break from past traditions and past forms. We will read such poets as Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Dorothy Parker, and Wallace Stevens. We will study how these poets employed the language of rejection and revolution, of making and remaking, of artistic appropriation and cultural emancipation. Traveling to the homes and workplaces of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens; to the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, where the institution of American Modernism was born; and even exploring the River Thames in the London of Eliot’s The Waste Land, we will see the sites that witnessed—and cultivated—the rise of American Modernism.
A version of this course is also on offer at Arizona State University.
ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.
The rigid and linear design of the traditional U.S. education system does not provide an effective ladder to social and economic opportunity for all learners and is not responsive to the rapidly evolving needs of society.
ASU’s Learning Enterprise exists to foster and grow universal access to social and economic opportunity at every stage of a person’s life. This aim’s fulfillment requires innovative, high-scale education enabled by ASU’s robust knowledge core.
The Harvard Division of Continuing Education offers open-enrollment courses, degrees and certificates, and professional development programs.
Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally.
HarvardX is a University-wide strategic initiative, overseen by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, to enable faculty to build and create open online learning experiences for residential and online use, and to enable groundbreaking research in online pedagogies.
