ENGL 391T(S) Anarchism, Modernism, and Form (Same as Literary Studies 391T)

Europe around the turn of the century was deeply alarmed by the specter of anarchism: bombings, assassinations, mutinies, and strikes seemed to foretoken a dreadful upheaval in European society. This tutorial focuses on modernist literature that explores this sense of crisis in searching, sometimes funny, often brilliant ways. Anarchism is a peculiar and loaded object of fascination for modernism: it flouts the politically conservative or apolitically formalist tendencies of some modernist works, yet it has affinities with modernism's radical aesthetic experimentation and its aggressive challenges to traditional social norms. Students will study such works as James's The Princess Casamassima, Conrad's The Secret Agent, Bely's Petersburg (which Nabokov declared one of the three greatest novels of this century), Zola's Paris, and Jarry's play Ubu Roi (whose first word caused a riot at its premiere) in conjunction with readings in the history and theory of anarchism (by, for example, Godwin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Tolstoy). We will consider questions such as: Why in these works do police agents so often resemble anarchists and vice-versa, acting out what looks like a perverse symbiosis? What relationship might there be between the "revolutionary" tendencies of modernist aesthetic innovation and the seemingly "formalist" tendencies of anarchism, with its peculiar lack of any positive political program to supersede the order it attacks? How far may we construe exorbitant sexual or bodily license in these texts as either anarchist or modernist? To what extent are the comic strategies in some of these novels subversive, politically or aesthetically? What is the significance of modernists' tendency to represent political subversion by means of radically new and disorienting literary techniques? What relationship might there be between the panic and outrage produced historically by anarchist attacks, and the anxiety that is either evinced in these literary texts or provoked by them in their outraged readers and rioting spectators?
Requirements: Students will meet with the instructor in pairs for an hour each week; they will write a short paper every other week (five in all), and will critique their partners' papers in alternate weeks. Emphasis will be on argumentation, and on developing focused and acute responses to and critiques of both one's own and others' writing and speech.
Prerequisite: English 101. Enrollment limited to 10.

Hour:  TIFFT