Università Roma Tre

The Jazz Age

The aim of this course is to acquaint students with the basic tools needed to critically address an American literary text and familiarize them with major theoretical schools originating in the USA. This year I will offer a fine-grained analysis of the literature of the Jazz Age. In particular, I will address the latest approaches in Modernism scholarship to single out the experimental quality of the Jazz Age's prose styles. Together we will discuss the most representative authors, their interest in the language of film and photography, and their bold assimilation of the black musical tradition. A special emphasis will be given to the ways in which contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison or Woody Allen incorporated the Jazz Age in their works.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "May Day", in Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), Edited by James West III, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 61-114.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), edited with an introduction by Tony Tanner, New York, Penguin (Paperback Edition), 2000.
-- Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro”, Survey Graphic, March 1925, special number on Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro
-- Rudolph Fisher, "The Caucasians Storm Harlem" and "The City of Refugees", in The City of Refugees (1925), Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2008.
-- Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (1926), Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1931), in The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945), New York, New Directions, 1993, pp. 13-22.
-- James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell me, What Is? (1979), in Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, 1998, pp. 780-783.
-- Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992), New York, Vintage, 2005.

PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THE FOLLOWING:
-- I will announce more primary sources and all secondary sources during the term, and publish a complete and definitive syllabus on my webpage at the end of the course.
-- Students who are not able to attend classes will study a separate syllabus, already available on line on my Università di Roma Tre webpage.