ENGL 393(F) What Was Modernism?

Now, in what is routinely characterized as a postmodernist era, is an especially good time to ask: What was Modernism? In English and American literature, the high tide of Modernism was the 1920s and 1930s, especially the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats, and the novels of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. This course will focus on such masterworks of modernism as The Waste Land, Ulysses, and To the Lighthouse to investigate what was new, what was traditional, and what eventually came to be regarded as "pre-postmodern" in the Modernist project. Our emphasis will be on the language of the texts, with some attention to developments in politics, history, the arts, philosophy, and culture generally. Requirements: Students will submit brief weekly reports, and a fifteen-page term paper, developed in consultation with the instructor. Major Seminar. Open only to English majors and to qualified non-majors. Permission of English Department chair required; see information above. Enrollment limited to 15.

Hour:  R. BELL