Twentieth Century American Fiction
This course was available in the past and may be presented again as part of the Master of Liberal Arts curriculum.
This course presents America's major writers of short fiction in the 20th century. We will begin with Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" in 1905 and proceed to the masters of High Modernism, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Porter, Welty, Ellison, Nabokov, on through the next generation, O'Connor, Pynchon, Roth, Mukherjee, Coover, Carver, and end with more recent work by Danticat, Tan and the microfictionists. Our initial effort with each text will be close reading, from which we will move out to consider questions of ethnicity, gender and psychology.
- Fulfills the Core - Humanities requirement
- Fulfills the Elective - Literary Studies requirement
- This course is a part of the Literary Studies concentration
About the Professor
William Veeder
William Veeder is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College. He has taught courses on American and British Gothic literature of the nineteenth century, contemporary fiction, and on specific figures such as Henry James and Ambrose Bierce. He is the author or coauthor of various books such as Mary Shelley and Frankenstein: the Fate of Androgyny; Henry James, the Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century; The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883; and Henry James: Lessons of the Master, as well as essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century Anglo-American gothic texts, psychoanalysis, gender issues, and popular culture.