English 540A: “Civilization and Its Discontents”: BritishModernism and Cultural Crisis

Freud remarks at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents that the “fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance in their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” Using this theme as the framework for our discussion, the seminar will consider how such modernist texts as The Waste Land, Mrs. Dalloway, Women in Love, and Point Counter Point respond to the prevalent sense during and following the Great War that civilization was in a state of crisis. The growth of psychoanalysis during this period --as an explanatory tool for both individual and social malaise-- will be one focus of our attention. Others might be contemporary politics, anthropology, science,and popular culture, depending on interests of members of the seminar.

Texts: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, David Bradshaw (ed.) A Concise Companion to Modernism

Texts:

• Freud, Sigmund. Civilization & Its Discontents.
• Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land & Other Poems.
• Lawrence, D.H. Women In Love.
• Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway.
• Huxley, Aldous. Point Counter Point.
• Bradshaw, David (ed.). A Concise Companion to modernism.