Course Details

Ragtime is probably the best-known novel by the recently deceased renowned American novelist E.L. Doctorow. Each of his 12 novels is situated in a different decade of American history beginning in the 1860s with The March. Ragtime takes place during the opening years of the 20th century and shows how the great social and economic changes of that period were reflected in the changing lives of three fictional families from different socioeconomic strata of New York society, who come to interact with each other through the intermediation of several fictionalized real celebrities of the time, including Evelyn Nesbitt and Emma Goldman. Many other significant historical personages also appear in the book, among them JP Morgan, Henry Ford, Freud, Stanford White, and Houdini. Doctorow delights the readers by letting them in on his wry, powerful, and subtle social criticism concealed in seemingly simple declarative sentences. In addition to giving a real feeling for how it was to live in this pre-WW I period, Ragtime is an amazing literary masterpiece.

This will be a discussion class with emphasis on both the literary and historical achievements of the novel, in which not one word is wasted, and much can be read between the lines. It is strongly advised to read the whole book in advance of class, since it does not have a plot that can be followed chronologically. The (bad, in my opinion) movie of the same name is a gross distortion of the novel, and should not be watched as a substitute—in fact, I advise against watching it at all, or at least until after reading the book.