ENGL 353 Reading the Global 1930s: Depression-era Literature, Philosophy, and Politics
Since the 2008 Crash, politicians, scholars, and journalists have compared America's current economic challenges to the Great Depression. This frequent comparison does not exhaust the significance of the Great Depression for the U.S. or the rest of the world. The 1930s is such an intriguing decade because the global economic collapse spawned new, or renewed older, political and artistic movements. In the global 1930's, people considered art central to rethinking political allegiances and the overarching meaning of politics itself. The 1930s helps to clarify the following question in our present-day: what cultural rebuilding remains to be done and how does art contribute to such processes? Writers of the 1930's took up this question in several different forms: through the trope of the document and its archival drive, the unconscious and the search for the Marvelous, the raised fist of labor movements or antiracist activism. This course will look at several literary (and related art) movements in, and cutting across, America, the Caribbean, and Europe. Texts will include (but are not limited to) documentary writing from Muriel Rukeyser, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes; Surrealist writing from Europe and the Caribbean, including Aime Cesaire and Georges Bataille; and other forms of art like the photography of Cathy Cahun.
Major Requirement Met: Group III