Yale professor Wai Chee Dimock opens AMST 246 by introducing Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner as the premier writers of American modernism. She lays out three scales for reading their novels: global geopolitics, experimental narration, and sensory detail, then applies each to a different author, Hemingway's global vision, Faulkner's narrative experiments, Fitzgerald's sensory texture. Drawing on critic Paul Fussell, she argues that all three writers share a preoccupation with World War I and its consequences for irony in narrative representation, tracing how the war reshaped what could be said and how storytelling handled the gap between idealism and experience. The lecture moves through linguistic taboos around war language and closes on Faulkner's treatment of wartime idealism. Recorded in Fall 2011 as the opening session of Yale's Open Course on these three writers.