2:30P-3:20P MWF (30) 3 cr

TOPIC: MODERNISM, MYSTICISM, AND MADNESS

This course's thematic exploration of the period will begin with
the premise that radical experimentation in writing, such as the
innovations associated with high modernism, must involve a
similarly radical re-orientation of thought and experience.  For
modernism, this re-orientation is primarily in the direction of a
de-centering, away from the traditional unified subject of the
realist tradition, and towards more dispersed awarenesses
characteristic of mysticism or schizophrenia.  Since writing
happens as much on and with the body and the mind as it does on
the blank sheet of paper, for both author and reader, modernist
innovations in literary form are thus not simply aesthetic
innovations -- they reconfigure the boundaries between 'normal'
or 'pathological' perceptions, between 'mundane' or 'mystical'
varieties of experience.  In this way, we will approach the
transatlantic and international phenonomena of literary modernism
by triangulating the aesthetic discourses of the time with those
of philosophy, psychology and religion, to explore the new
possibilities for lived experience in the twentieth century that
the modernists recorded and made culturally available through
their writings.  The course will require three papers, a midterm
and a final.  We will read works from a variety of authors,
tentatively including:  Dostoevsky, H. James, Rilke, Kafka,
Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner, Stein, N. West, Rhys, C. Williams.