FSEM 152   The Jazz Age

Faculty Profile for Professor Coyle

A reconsideration of what F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed “the Jazz Age” in terms of the American inscription of race between the First World War and the Great Depression. Students read Langston Hughes with William Carlos Williams, Dorothy Parker with Dubose Heyward, Nella Larsen with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and read everyone in terms of the African American musics that were profoundly transforming the sound and feel of American life. And troubling the foundation of everything else is T.S. Eliot’s legendary critique of modern life, The Waste Land. At all times students will consider the relations among ways of reading and writing and thinking, among ways of representing our lives and ways of changing them. Students who successfully complete this seminar will earn credit for ENGL 205 and satisfy one half of the human thought and expression areas of inquiry requirement.

Professor of English, Michael Coyle, is founding President of the Modernist Studies Association, Past President of the International T.S. Eliot Society and recipient of its Lifetime Service Award, and has served on the advisory board of the National Poetry Foundation. He writes about modern poets like T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, and Ezra Pound, and modernist cultural productions ranging from the formation of popular culture itself to jazz, radio, the martini cocktail, and discourses of race after the First World War.