Instructor: Patricia Chu
Tuesdays & Thursdays 12-1pm | Location: Barker 024
Enrollment: Limited to 27 students.
Originally from the title of an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, the phrase “The Gilded Age” quickly passed into popular parlance as the name of the period following the Civil War in America: a time when immense fortunes and superficial appearances of growth and prosperity co-existed with growing poverty and unrest. As a number of economists have argued, income disparities in the United States are currently at their highest levels since the end of the 1920s, when the arrival of the Great Depression produced a consensus in favor of the more equitable distribution of wealth. In other words, we are now living in America’s new Gilded Age. In this class we will explore this premise by first examining how representative novels of the classic Gilded Age (approximately 1870 through 1930) represented social structures—how authors tried to comprehend and depict “the way the world works” and the individual’s life in it—and then comparing and contrasting these with novels of a new gilded age, including the way depictions of globalization and economic empire as central to American national identity develop over time and across national boundaries (England, India). We will study the novel as a genre and literary realism as a strategy of representation and how these emerge from social and political history. We will also read brief accounts of the economic culture of each historical moment. Authors may include: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, William Dean Howells, Aravind Adiga, Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen.
Note: Be sure to attend first class meeting to be considered for admittance.