Instructor: C. Rottenberg
The “Roaring 20s” evokes images of jazz, the flapper, cabarets, Harlem, the bohemian life of Greenwich Village, and a time of greater freedoms for women in the US. All of these images are associated with urban life and have clear racial, class, gender, and sexual connotations. In this course, we will be examining classic Jazz-Age Jewish-American and African-American fiction that presents “New Woman” female protagonists. We will be tracing the differences between the representation of the Jewish-American “New Woman” and the “New Negro Woman,” while discussing what these differences might signify with respect to the positionality of Jewish and black women in the US. Using classic essays on the city (Robert Park, Louis Wirth), contemporary feminist urban studies (Elizabeth Wilson) as well as theoretical and cultural histories that concentrate on the emergence of “The New Woman,” we will bring the following questions to bear on the literary texts: Can New Womanhood in all of its various “ethnic” and “racial” manifestations be considered an urban phenomenon? Is the city depicted as a site of greater freedom for these women who are positioned on the margins of dominant white US society? And, if yes, what does this greater freedom consist of?
This course is meant to introduce students to classic Jewish-American and African-American works from the Jazz Age, the burgeoning field of feminist urban studies, and cultural historical and theoretical work on “New Womanhood.”
