Nicolas Witschi
Department of English
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
616-387-2604
nicolas.witschi@wmich.edu

When The New Yorker magazine first appeared in February of 1925, founding editor Harold Ross assured readers that his magazine would be different. Unlike the mass of magazines in national circulation, The New Yorker would not temper and dilute its content in order to achieve the common denominator necessary for national success. Catering to a very specific audience and to very specific tastes, The New Yorker appealed to an artistic sensibility founded on a social hierarchy that only New Yorkers would appreciate. Publishing in and for New York, Ross thus reversed the assumption that what counted in his city would also play in Peoria. Not surprisingly, Harold Ross was in 1925 not alone in the game of defining taste. As this seminar will explore, the lines of artistic and social hierarchies were being evaluated and redrawn across the spectrum of cultural production, involving multiple intersections between the fields of literature, film, history, science, education, and a burgeoning middlebrow sensibility. As a single year, 1925 exemplifies quite well the conflicts and compromises encountered by American artists in their efforts to generate a uniquely American culture. The resulting legacy, one profoundly marked by distinctions of taste and privilege, still governs American perceptions of what constitutes "high" culture and "good" art.

In literature, for instance, Modernism comes head to head with late Realism. Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter exemplifies his maturing into a style learned from Gertrude Stein, whose The Making of Americans also appears in this year. Two further landmark texts in American Modernism, The Great Gatsby and In Our Time, are also published. However, this same year also sees the publication of successful novels by two inheritors of the Realist tradition, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, plus Yezierska’s Bread Givers and also Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, a text that sits uneasily between the two poles. Meanwhile, Alain Locke’s The New Negro anthology helps launch the Harlem Renaissance, signifying yet a third direction in the meeting of Modernism and socially-minded literature. Along the lines of taste-making and social hierarchy, plans to establish The Book-of-the-Month Club are undertaken in 1925. And in the intersection of law, science, and education, the pivotal Scopes Trial in Tennessee features the creationist argument of an aging William Jennings Bryan pitted against Clarence Darrow’s defense of the teaching of Darwinian evolution in schools. This particular battle also represents another aspect of 1925 that Harold Ross’s rationale for The New Yorker underscores, namely the dynamic between the presumed center of New York and the periphery of the rest of the nation. Indeed, New York’s situation as producer of popular culture is in at least one respect challenged by Chicago, where Al Capone succeeds Johnny Torrio as head of the city’s bootlegging operations, thus beginning a career that would rapidly raise Capone to the status of cultural icon and media celebrity. Finally, the widely popular achievements of filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Harold Lloyd, and Erich von Stroheim suggest the extent to which cinematic language was beginning to realize both its audience’s tastes and the medium’s many complexities of narrative form.

A cultural studies/historicist examination of what is at stake in literary periodization, this course will explore the many intersections, convergences, and divergences evident in the cultural production of this single year. With an eye towards what they tell us of the legacy of the 1920s, we will consider a number of readings together, mostly novels, films, and a few other notable texts. Additionally, independently undertaken research projects will further broaden our understanding of the range of issues and concerns occupying Americans in this crucial year of stock-taking and line-drawing.

• The short analytical paper will present an interpretive close-reading of one of the primary texts on the syllabus (with any critical/theoretical framework you choose).
• The review of a recent scholarly book should be written in accordance with the review style of a journal of your choosing, limited to no more than 800 words.
  
• The purpose of the final project is to have you conduct in-depth research either on a particular text on the syllabus or, more broadly if you wish, on any particular aspect of American culture during 1925. Presentation of your work will consist of two phases, each worth 25% of your grade: 1) an oral presentation of approximately 20 minutes in length, which will also serve as an initial prospectus for further research; and 2) a 20 page paper to be turned in at the end of the semester. Topics for your project might include (but are certainly not limited to) the following events, issues, and texts associated with 1925: