WGS.2052 Race, Class, and Gender in U.S. Fiction
This course explores works of American fiction through the lens of race, class, and gender. We will examine how these social categories have evolved over time in different literary genres and cultural forms (modernist fiction, popular magazine writing, hard-boiled detective stories, folk tales, urban realism, mass-media advertisements, blues and jazz music, etc). We will be particularly concerned with changing definitions of whiteness, the color line, and the foreigner, with ideas of masculinity and femininity, and with what it has meant to be "poor" or "rich" in America. This course will foreground the relationship between formal experimentation and shifting cultural perceptions and ideologies.