540: Introduction to British Modernism Spring 2008


This course does four things: orient the student with an overview of British modernism circa 1900-1930; provide a general background for modernity torqued toward aesthetics and philosophy (Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson); engage some current critical conversations in the field of literary modernism; and allow focus on the work of particular authors. As the first sentence may suggest, even as this course is about British modernism, we work with an international context. The class is loosely organized around two heuristic rubrics: minds and matter; we will engage the topoi of embodiment and materiality, with particular attention to the status of the modernist object. Along the way the student will get a grip on the historical avant-gardes of Vorticism and Imagism—that's history--and some sense of how to do research in periodical studies, arguably one of the major legacies we have from the era—that's methodology and history. To this end, we will dovetail some readings with the visit hosted here by the Modernist Studies Reading Group of Professor Sean Latham, one of the organizers of the Modernist Journals Project, as well as a terrific modernist scholar in his own right. This is damn great.

Texts include prose (Conrad's The Secret Agent; Ford's Good Soldier, West's The Return of the Soldier), poetry (Loy, Pound, Auden), essays and manifestos. Our guide will be the brand new Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (available in paperback), by the terribly smart and incessantly lucid Pericles Lewis. We won't read much Woolf on the assumption that you will or have elsewhere, but she is at the door: such discussion or orientation is welcome. Students will write a 1,000 word book review of a critical monograph published 2006-8 and a final research paper.

Suggested pre-class reading: Survey The Modernist Journals Project online—try Blast: http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8080/exist/mjp/mjp_journals.xq
Too, a canter through Levenson's The Genealogy of Modernism and Ekstein's Rites of Spring would be appropriate spring break reading and give a fulsome sense of occurrence.