English 315/C Lit 320: European Modernism
Professor Staten
Padelford Hall B409
hstaten@u.washington.edu

Baudelaire, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Kafka, Woolf, and Camus: these are the modernist authors we will study in this course. Modernist writers explored areas of experience that literature had formerly neglected (extreme or even pathological states of mind, commonplace things and people, sexuality and other corporeal processes, and so forth), and in the course of this exploration they moved away from traditional literary forms, inventing radically new forms (of which the most familiar are free verse and stream of consciousness).
The first half of the course will be on poetry, the second half on fiction. There will be an intensive focus on “how to read poetry.”

There will be a 2-3 page paper on Baudelaire due the second week (worth 20% of your grade); a 4-5 page mid-term paper on Rilke and Eliot (40 %); and a final, 4-5 page, paper on modernist fiction (40%). Your entire grade will be based on these three papers.

Poems:
Baudelaire, poems (xerox)
Rilke, poems (xerox)
Eliot, Selected Poems
Fictional works:
Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Camus, The Stranger

The work of Baudelaire and Rilke will be available in a course packet from the Ave. Copy Center, 4141 University Way (known as “the Ave.”). It’s below street level, located beneath the University Credit Union. The other texts (Metamorphosis, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Stranger) will be available at the University Bookstore. I strongly recommend you buy the editions that I’ve ordered for you; otherwise you won’t have the same page numbers, and it will be hard for you to follow class discussion of the text.