NOTE: The complete pdf of syllabus is located under the "Modules" tab, and is also accessible via the "Course Materials" link on the home page. This is a brief course description
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ENGLISH 200B Reading Literary Forms: “Modernism and its Afterlives”
The focal point of this course will be (1) literary modernism, whose historical period occurred roughly between 1890 and 1950, and (2) its “afterlives”—i.e., the effects this period of artistic experimentation had on the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. In order to center modernism in our critical frame, we will read one work published at the beginning of its historical edge, one work from the heart of its historical center, and one work of postmodernism. In order to center modernism’s “afterlives” we will watch two films that attempt to adapt and/or reinterpret our first two novels.
Key Questions:
- What is modernism? Why does modernist literature continue to survive and thrive in contemporary literature and art?
- What is “formal experimentation”? How did modernism use it? What were its primary techniques? And most importantly: How does formal experimentation change the relationship between art and its audience?
- How do period boundaries facilitate and constrain the act of criticism and interpretation?
- How does modernist art—and its many formal experiments—influence contemporary art and culture?
The Novels / The Movies:
The first novel is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published at the beginning of the modernist period (1899). This work explores colonialism and the modernizing forces that sustained it, as well as the complex cultural and psychological forces that connected national metropoles with their colonies. Its publication on the cusp of the 20th century makes it an inflection point between 19th century realism (and its commitment to everyday subject matter and realistic representation) and many of the formal characteristics that would define literary modernism, most notably ambiguity and indeterminacy. We will then watch Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) a movie deeply indebted to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but which transposes its colonial concerns into the context of the Vietnam war.
The second novel is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925 at the height of the modernist era. Set at the end of WWI, the story takes place entirely in the urban heart of London over the course of a single day. It uses stream-of-consciousness narration in order to explore the nature of time, memory, mental illness, and subjectivity. It also pursues many social and political themes that predominated during the interwar period such as empire and colonialism, socialism and class consciousness, feminism and changing gender roles, and sexuality. We will pair this with the film The Hours(2002)—based on the 1998 novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham—which is a contemporary and multi-perspectival adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway.
Our third and final novel is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire published in 1962. It is a decidedly “postmodernist” novel that builds on the experimental ethos of modernism, but whose metafictional elements, linguistic games, unreliable narrator, and pervasive humor are representative of a marked shift in post-WW2 literature. This work will allow us to (a) examine one of modernism’s most important “afterlives” (i.e., postmodernism), (b) put the themes and techniques of modernism into sharper relief, and (c) interrogate the usefulness of periodization more generally as a tool for examining and interpreting works of literature.