ENGL 23503 American Literature: Trauma and Modernity
GE-Human Culture: Literature “History is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s trauma” – this claim by a contemporary literary scholar is the central assumption of our course. As you read through American literature since the Civil War, you will experience how it struggles with feeling somehow different from everything that has come before (the issue of modernity) as well as how it focuses often on debilitating pain and suffering (the issue of trauma). Are we still modern? How do we deal with the trauma of others? Ultimately, your study of the literature of the United States of the twentieth century will help us understand who we are today.
Credits
3