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Course Description

Summary

"It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution, fueled by new communications technology, music, popular entertainment, the end of racial segregation, and a creative renaissance in a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan called Harlem. Modernism, the Bohemians of Greenwich Village and Montparnasse, the lawlessness of the Prohibition era are all a part of the cultural backdrop. We'll read the leading lights of the literary scene in New York and in Paris (Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes) and their counterparts in booming Harlem: Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen.