Fall 2001

Prof. Lori Landay

GCOR 112, sections 3 & 4

Office: 22 The Fenway, rm 34

(617) 747-2423

voicemail: (617) 747-2747

llanday@berklee.edu

OVERVIEW

The Jazz Age: an era of modernism, sexual liberalism, the Charleston, racial identity, silent film, and of course, jazz music. This interdisciplinary course takes a Cultural Studies approach to explore key aspects of the 1920s through its film, literature, art, advertising, and music. The storytellers, media makers, artists, musicians, and other creators of culture perceived that they were experiencing a "revolution in manners and morals;" they articulated and shaped the enormous cultural shift from a Victorian producer ethic to a modern consumption ethic. We will use a range of methods of inquiry and critical processes to understand the connections between and influences among different media, aesthetics, and cultural ethics.

We will embark on a journey through Jazz Age America; we will visit and explore important sites of cultural production. We begin in the Midwest where Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," move East like Jay Gatsby and North like Zora Neale Hurston,, kick up our heels with film flappers Clara Bow and Joan Crawford, leave America for Paris and Pamplona with Ernest Hemingway and Josephine Baker, return Home to Harlem with Claude McKay, delve into the political and aesthetic debates surrounding the poetry, fiction, and art of the Harlem Renaissance, and end up in Hollywood on the cusp between silent and sound film. We will explore the key aspects of the decade: modernism, style, sexuality, constructions of racial identity, the emergence of mass consumer culture, and the shift in values from a Victorian work ethic to a hedonistic consumption ethic. To do this, we will screen some silent and early sound film, examine magazines from the period, read a range of literary and historical works, listen to music, and view art.

We will take advantage of our location in Boston, with trips to the Museum of Fine Arts to see modernist art and with creative group projects on what Boston was like in the 1920s.