The Teaching Company:  Twentieth Century American Fiction (Audio)  
Thirty-two 30min lectures   56kbps/22khz



1 American Fiction and the Individualist Creed
2 The American Self—Ghost in Disguise
3 What Produces "Nobody"?
4 Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio—Writing as the Talking Cure
5 Winesburg—A New American Prose-Poetry
6 Hemingway—Journalist, Writer, Legend
7 Hemingway as Trauma Artist
8 Hemingway's Cunning Art
9 F. Scott Fitzgerald—Tender Is the Night—Fitzgerald's Second Act
10 Fitzgerald's Psychiatric Tale
11 Dick's Dying Fall—An American Story
12 Light in August—Midpoint of the Faulkner Career
13 Light in August—Determinism vs. Freedom
14 Light in August—Novel as Poem, or, Beyond Holocaust
15 Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God—Canon Explosion
16 Their Eyes Were Watching God—From Romance to Myth
17 Flannery O'Connor—Realist of Distances
18 O'Connor—Taking the Measure of the Region
19 Williams Burroughs—Bad Boy of American Literature
20 Naked Lunch—The Body in Culture
21 Naked Lunch—Power and Exchange in the Viral World
22 Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five—Apocalypse Now
23 Vonnegut's World—Tralfamadore or Trauma?
24 Robert Coover—Postmodern Fabulator
25 The Public Burning—Execution at Times Square
26 Robert Coover—Fiction as Fission
27 Toni Morrison's Sula—From Trauma to Freedom
28 Sula—New Black Woman
29 Don DeLillo—Decoder of American Frequencies
30 White Noise—Representing the Environment
31 DeLillo and American Dread
32 Conclusion—Nobody's Home

NOTE:  Hemingway's brand of macho is politically incorrect today, but his work remains a permanent feature of the American landscape, and his terse, tight-lipped style has influenced generations of journalists and writers. In Our Time introduces war and violence to American readers in unheard-of ways.