Description
As the poet and essayist Anders Monson cleverly notes, “The history of literature is the history of experimental literature.” Nowhere is this observation more accurate than when applied to the modernist literature produced between 1910 and 1950. These were writers in the midst of a radical new world, responding to the tremors and speed caused by industrialism and the shock of World War I in radical and liberating ways. In this reading-intensive course, students will explore and discuss a diversity of modernist novels and writings. Assigned novels include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, as well as shorter works and excerpts by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, W.B. Yeats, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean Rhys.