With the goal of enhancing our critical reading and writing skills—while, most importantly, cultivating a greater appreciation for literature—this course will focus on the highly influential movement of Anglo-American Modernism. Roughly covering the first half of the twentieth century, this movement raised many important questions and doubts about rationality, language, and even the future of humankind. In the face of Modernism’s seemingly dire pessimism, some important question we will consider include: what can (still) be done? and where can we go from here? Close readings of poetry, prose, and drama will, in part, allow us to explore the causes and consequences of an age’s loss of values and belief in human progress. But beyond simply diagnosing this pervasive sense of disillusion, we will also seek out the ways in which such seminal high modernists as Barnes, Beckett, Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, Faulkner, Ford, Woolf, and Stevens struggled to make grief, failure, boredom, and human insufficiency the material with which to (attempt to) begin again.

Assignments will include two 5-7 page papers, several short responses, and a group presentation

Texts:

• Barnes. Nightwood.
• Beckett. Waiting for Godot.
• Conrad. Heart of Darkness.
• Faulkner. As I Lay Dying.
• Ford. The Good Soldier.
• Woolf. To the Lighthouse.

There will also be a required course reader