L380 25327 LITERARY MODERNISM
Judith Brown

4:00p-5:15p TR (30 students) 3 cr., A&H.

TOPIC: “The Movements of Literary Modernism”

In this class, we will study the literary forms and revolutionary aesthetics that emerged in the early twentieth century movement known as modernism. We will focus particularly on the idea of movement that so enraptured the moderns—whether through the representation of speed, fracture, transition, exile or endless wandering—and consider the historical and philosophical forces that may have contributed to this fascination. We will look at some visual art—beginning with the 1905 expressionist exhibition in London and the 1913 Armory Show in New York—but the class will primarily focus on poetry and fiction, and the many movements that together made up modernism, including cubism, imagism, vorticism, and dadaism. Students should be prepared to read challenging work that resists any easy interpretation. Our writers will include Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer. We may also consider the modernist silent film Borderline (starring H.D. and Paul Robeson) and its attempt to represent the unconscious.

You will be expected to write 2 papers in this class, and to take a final exam. Students will also be asked to write an occasional response paper to be read aloud in class.