Low Modernism

This course seeks to move before the great divide, even as it starts with Andreas Huyssen's /After the Great Divide/. We will engage high modernism by reading for various forms of the low. Versions of the low are likely to be the everyday (Woolf's /Jacob's Room/; /Ulysses/); the demotic (/Ulysses/, slang), the profane (the Welsh writer Caradoc Evans "[He] would appear to have raked in the garbage of the countryside for his characters” [/The Western Mail/, 13 November, 1915], /Ulysses/), the obscene: modernism and censorship (Lawrence, /Ulysses/), and the popular (bestsellers like /Trilby, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,/ /The Green Hat/). Students are expected to have some sense of (a) modernism, whether in literary or other artistic incarnations. The careful reader will have surmised that reading /Ulysses/ over the summer would not be time ill spent.