For SUMMER 2007 and AUTUMN 2007: We will read a variety of poems and fictional works from France, Germany, England, and the U.S. in order to get a sense of the complex phenomenon called “modernism,” a style or cluster of styles of writing that flourished from roughly 1910-1930. There is no simple definition of what this term means; like other period terms in literary theory (cf. “romanticism” or “realism”), it refers not to any single quality of literary works but to a diverse set of stylistic characteristics, any of which might be missing from any given work referred to as modernist. Thus the only way to get a sense of how the term works is to read a number of texts that are labeled with it and see how they are similar and how they are different.

We will also be concerned with the methodology of the study of literature and specifically with the method called formalism. Formalism in criticism developed in close contact with modernism in literature (for example, T.S. Eliot is both one of the central modernist poets and one of the fathers of formalism) and could thus be called “modernist criticism.” In my class lectures I will continually stress formalist methods of reading, and in the papers you write you will be expected to develop skill in these methods.

There will be a short warm-up paper on modernist poetry in the first week, followed by a 3-4 page mid-term paper on the same topic. Your final paper will be a 4-5 page paper on modernist fiction. I highly recommend that you buy a manual, handbook, or glossary of literary terms (any one will do), and use it to look up concepts like ‘modernism,’ ‘romanticism,’ ‘sonnet,’ and so forth. You should study the definitions of these terms over and over during the quarter to try to get them firmly into your heads.

We will spend the first half of the course reading the work of three poets, the last half the work of three prose writers, as follows: Poems: Baudelaire, poems (xerox), Rilke, poems (xerox), Eliot, Selected Poems; Fiction: Kafka, The Metamorphosis, Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Gide, The Counterfeiters The work of Baudelaire and Rilke will be available in a course packet from the Ave. Copy Center, 4141 University Way.