John Dos Passos by
Unique among American books for its epic scope and panoramic social sweep,U.S.A.has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. Now The Library of America presents an exclusive one-volume edition of this enduring masterwork by John Dos Passos, including for the first time detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events that serve as a backdrop. In the novels that make up the trilogy-The 42nd Parallel,1919, andThe Big Money-Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation.
The Crying of Lot 49 by
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels "A puzzle, an intrigue, a literary and historical tour de force." -- San Francisco Examiner The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon's highly original classic satire of modern America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in what would appear to be an international conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.
Woman on the Edge of Time by
Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future, and able to communicate with the year 2137. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to the future and its lessons for today.... "From the Paperback edition."
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Course Description Provided by Dr. Vollaro
Digital technology is changing the way humans read, think, conduct research, and encounter new ideas, so it should be no surprise to learn that we do not read or discuss literature the way people did in the 20th Century. What does it mean for literature to be “modern” in a social context shaped by smartphones, social media, Tik Tok, Wikipedia, and emergent generative AI? In this course,? Certainly, our sense of modern literature is defined by key 20th century cultural movements—Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism, etc.—but we also define literature and experience it differently because of the digital tools we use.
This course will explore the intersection between modern literature and digital technologies. It is a 4000-level literature course, so we will be doing close reading and literary analysis while learning about the historical, social, and cultural contexts of the literary texts we read, but we will do so using digital tools and analyzing our use of those tools as we proceed. We will read four challenging novels written over the last century--each one groundbreaking and boundary pushing in its own way--and we explore what was modern about each in the time it was published, but we will also consider these works from the perspective of our sense of modernity.
Below you will find links to various supplementary readings for the course.
