(Modernism and the Frankfurt School)

With hindsight, modernism seems less and less a unified literary movement and more of a ceaseless critical project. The hopes and fears that inspired the avant-garde extend well beyond the bounds of aesthetic aspiration and past the Second World War. In fact, New Modernisms continue to proliferate across culture, art, and theory, suggesting, in the words of one critic, that the original "ideology has assumed the quality of a self-fulfilling prophecy, left by the modernists to be fulfilled through other selves." In this course, we will explore the conflation of art and critique, its causes, its practice, its evolution. Using key texts of both modernist literature and critical theory, we will consider phenomena that challenged the institutional frames of aesthetic, theoretical, and social praxis. The course will be organized around competing definitions of modernism - the avant-garde, the romantic, the classical, the dialectical - and readings will serve to heighten the tensions between these various models. Discussion will focus on those issues around which these competing definitions were formed, on political movements such as fascism, nazism, communism, and liberalism as well as on topics such as technology, the nation, spectacle, commodification, consumerism, gender, and the body. During the last few weeks, we will consider the modernist legacy in terms of post-war and postmodern theory. We might occasionally meet with Professor Watt's class in order to discuss texts and matters of mutual interest.

A tentative reading list of creative writings includes F.T. Marinetti's Selected Manifestos, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and The Wild Body, and James Joyce's Ulysses. Critical writings will most likely include essays by Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Siegfried Kracauer, Andreas Huyssen, Georg Lukacs's Theory of the Novel, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde. Students will be required to produce an abstract, a 10-page conference paper, and a 20-25 page research essay. There are no prerequisites, but it will help if you have some knowledge of canonical modernist authors. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions regarding texts or organization; comments would be greatly appreciated.