ENGL 380(S) The Art of Modern Crisis
The first half of the twentieth century was marked by extraordinary social and
political upheaval. The same era witnessed a feverishly creative revolution in the
nature and strategies of artistic representation. In this course we will examine
what these two kinds of crisis have to do with one another: how a wide range of
startling innovations in literary and cinematic art may be seen as responses to the
particular pressures of the historical crises they represent. Focussing mainly on
Britain, we will study such diverse historical crises as the spread of anarchism
around the turn of the century; the sensational advent of a public discourse of
homosexuality in the trials of Oscar Wilde; the Irish and the Bolshevik revolutions; the woman's suffrage movement and the emergence of the so-called
"New Woman"; World War I and II; and the Cold War. Novels, poems and films
will be studied for their distinctive, often dazzling aesthetic strategies for representing these crises, and will include such works as Conrad's The Secret Agent,
Bely's Petersburg, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, poems of Yeats and Owen, Ford's
Parade's End, Eisenstein's Potemkin, Heller's Catch-22, and Kubrick's Dr.
Strangelove.
Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: active class participation, two papers, and a final exam.
Prerequisites: 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 25). Preference given to English majors.
(Post-1900)