Professor Monika Kaup
Global Modernism
Writers around the world responded to the upheavals of modernization (urbanization, (im)migration, industrialization, technological advance as well as intensified imperialism) with an unprecedented wave of literary and artistic experimentation, which is commonly referred to as modernism. Writers viewed the social crises of modernization as a crisis of the imagination—the old ways of portraying human experience were no longer adequate. Standard plots, verse forms, narrative techniques, and the boundaries of genre had to go, and new literary forms of expression had to be invented.
Complementing companion courses on modernism (ENGL 338: “Modern Poetry”; ENGL 337: “The Modern Novel”), this course offers a global approach to modernist literature. It builds on but opens out beyond established Anglo-American modernist figures from the UK and the US (Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats), to consider anglophone modernisms from the global south and the former territories of the British empire. Unlike European modernism, global modernist experimentation extends well into the post-WW II period.
Tentative Reading List:
Joseph Conrad (Poland/UK), Heart of Darkness (1899)
James Joyce (Ireland), “The Dead” (1914)
Katherine Mansfield (short story, New Zealand), “Prelude,” “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” “The Garden Party,”
W.B. Yeats (poetry, Ireland)
Mulk Raj Anand (India), Untouchable (1935)
Sheila Watson (Canada), The Double Hook (1959)
Derek Walcott (Poetry, West Indies),
Christopher Okigbo (poetry, Nigeria)
Wole Soyinka (drama, Nigeria), Death and the King’s Horseman (1975)
J.M. Coetzee (South Africa), The Life and Times of Michael K. (1983)
Shorter readings will be made available on the canvas course website. Fiction will be available at the UW Bookstore. You must purchase the editions I’ve ordered because we will be referring to these editions in class. Kindle and other unpaginated digital editions are unsuitable for close reading, the method we will be using in this class.