NP Literature and the Depression ...

[Dave Monroe]

Well, my friend who asked for auto/biography et al. recommendations
won't actually have to make use of any of them 'til later in the
semester, so I still don't know what he's using.  In the meantime,
another friend had the tablecloth pulled out from under teaching a Comp
Lit course on the literature of the Great Depression.  A mandated shift
in emphasis left her having to largely teach novels, and, in particular,
"masterpieces" or somesuch, where she had a rather wider range of types
of works  and a definite emphasis AGAINST so-called "masterpieces" in
mind.

While a couple o' drunks (well, okay, I wasn't drinking, but she
certainly was) did convince her to add William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
(I THINK this was a good thing), and she otherwise seems to have her
curriculum set, I gotta admit, while it's not exactly my area/era of
interest, I still felt badly not being able to come up with much in the
way of suggestions, esp. beyond the specifically American depression
(she's starting from Weimar cabaret culture, I believe), so ...

Faulkner, Dos Passos (and she didn't want to attempt even part of the
U.S.A. Trilogy in a semsester, though I know she's interested in it, I
think Mark Denning's The Cultural Front has been a big influence), Henry
Roth's Call it Sleep, Alexander Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (imagine
teaching THAT in a semester ... though you could spend a week or two
watching the film as well) and the "hard boiled novel" (and here I
pushed for either James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice or
Dashiel Hammett's Red Harvest, as being esp., er, Depressing, albeit not
exactly "masterpieces") were my only ideas of any note, so ... well, if
anybody has any ideas, though they'll largely be only for my benefit now
...