L649 25341 BROWN (#5)
British Literature Since 1900

1:00p – 2:15p TR

TOPIC: MODERNISM AND THE AESTHETICS OF FEELING

In this class we will think about the fate of feeling in the early
twentieth century.  What happened, for example, to the eighteenth
century aesthetic and affective category of the sublime that
produced such a potent combination of dread and ecstasy?  Is there
an ecstatic modernism or is modernism best expressed by the
anaesthetized body?  We’ll respond to this question by first
grounding ourselves in the historical articulation of the sublime
(Longinus, Burke, Kant), then some Romantic responses (Wordsworth,
Keats, Turner), before turning to the twentieth century.  We will be
particularly interested in the various expressions of feeling in the
modernist period – from humiliation to indifference to ecstasy – and
in the possibility that the sublime was translated for the modern
age, using abstraction and obscurity, and linking technology with
death.  Our readings may include Freud, Conrad, Woolf, Stevens,
Forster, Lawrence, Eliot, Barnes, Stein, Toomer and Rhys, as well as
more recent critical work (Rei Terada, Sianne Ngai, Charles Altieri).

Modernism and the Aesthetics of Feeling is organized as a “readings”
class, thus the reading load will be quite heavy (sometimes a novel
plus critical work in a week), and the writing less so – likely a
conference-length paper and some reading responses.  Participation,
of course, is important and students can expect to give at least one
presentation.