LARTS 490J Advanced Seminar:The Jazz Age:The Roaring Twenties
Advanced Seminar: The Jazz Age focuses on the American society of the 1920s, echoing the concerns of today: new and changing gender roles, institutional political polarization; racial progress and the rise of racial resentment; the growth of diverse urban populations and a deepening rural American nativism; the widening gap between rich and poor; new technologies and the new consumer cultures that exploit them. Students will explore and discuss the new culture of the 1920s: the popular worlds of musical performance and recordings, Black and white, the rise of success of film as an industry, an art form, and a social signifier.
Our seminar will use F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as a frame for this discussion, since the novel refers to virtually every one of these social forces – from gender, race and class to movies, jazz and even baseball.