ENGL 23041 - Modernist Literatures

Course Credit: 1
This course addresses the history of prose fiction and poetry roughly at the point at which the novel and poetics start to become a self-conscious and problematic literary form. We begin with an overview of the literary philosophies with which and against which modernist writers worked (Romanticism, Social Realism, Naturalism) and then proceed to more radical and complex formal experiments of great “high modernists,” such as Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Hemingway, Toomer, Hesse, and others. We consider the question of what is now called “postmodernism,” particularly through reading excerpts from Joyce’s Ulysses and in important recent theorizing about problems of narrative and representation. Throughout, the course pays close attention to the social and political meanings of both experimental narrative techniques and theories of fiction, exploring the multi- and transnational aspects of this movement alongside other modernist endeavors, such as painting, drama, and photography. [AH]