20th Century American Fiction
The Teaching Company - Arnold Weinstein
Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Faulkner. No first names are needed.
These giants of literature are immediately recognizable to anyone who loves to read fiction and even to many who don’t.
Now, thanks to this course from Brown University’s Professor Arnold Weinstein, you can develop fresh insight into these and eight other great American authors of the 20th century. Professor Weinstein sheds light not only on the sheer magnificence of these writers’ literary achievements but explores their uniquely American character as well. Despite their remarkable variety, each represents an outlook and a body of work that could only have emerged in the United States.
Course Lecture Titles
American Fiction and the Individualist Creed
The American Self—Ghost in Disguise
What Produces "Nobody"?
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio—Writing as the Talking Cure
Winesburg—A New American Prose-Poetry
Hemingway—Journalist, Writer, Legend
Hemingway as Trauma Artist
Hemingway's Cunning Art
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Night-Fitzgerald's Second Act
Fitzgerald's Psychiatric Tale
Dick's Dying Fall—An American Story
Light in August—Midpoint of the Faulkner Career
Light in August—Determinism vs. Freedom
Light in August—Novel as Poem, or, Beyond Holocaust
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God—Canon Explosion
Their Eyes Were Watching God—From Romance to Myth
Flannery O'Connor—Realist of Distances
O'Connor—Taking the Measure of the Region
William Burroughs—Bad Boy of American Literature
Naked Lunch—The Body in Culture
Naked Lunch—Power and Exchange in the Viral World
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse—Five—Apocalypse Now
Vonnegut's World—Tralfamadore or Trauma?
Robert Coover—Postmodern Fabulator
The Public Burning—Execution at Times Square
Robert Coover—Fiction as Fission
Toni Morrison's Sula—From Trauma to Freedom
Sula—New Black Woman
Don DeLillo—Decoder of American Frequencies
White Noise—Representing the Environment
DeLillo and American Dread
Conclusion—Nobody's Home