Description

Much f the influential literature produced during the modernist period, roughly 1900-1950, was considered radical in its time. This course will focus on the experimental, avant-garde impulse that manifests itself in the themes and techniques of key modernist texts, relating that impulse to questions about the nature of identity, the role of gender and class in constituting the modernist subject, and the sociocultural functions of literature itself. Readings will primary texts such as Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God, T.S. Eliot's poetry, and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as theoretical texts. We will explore this period by examining these exemplary texts, historical and social events, and films.