“Modernity is a word in search of its meaning” says Nobel-Prize winner Octavio Paz. This seminar will search for the meanings of “the modern” and “modernity” across literature, art, and philosophy. First, we’ll focus on the emergence of a distinctly modern poetic sensibility in Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, modern narrative technique in Flaubert (Madame Bovary), and modern painterly style in Manet. Next we’ll explore the sense of crisis informing the vision of modernity in Wagner (Tristan und Isolde), Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner), and Ibsen (Ghosts). Finally, we’ll study two modernist classics, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The goal is (i) to develop a good sense of how major modern writers, artists, and thinkers perceived themselves, their art, and the changing world around them, and (ii) to gain insights into the origins, aspirations, and conflicted progress of “the modern,” from the mid-nineteenth century through the aftermath of World War I. The key works mentioned above as well as a packet of essays on the topic of modernity will be discussed by the whole class. Students will be expected to do additional research around those works and write two papers.

Texts:

• Charles Baudelaire. Flowers of Evil, tr. Richard Howard. Godine (publ.). [ISBN 0879234628]
• Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary. Oxford World Classics, Mauldon tr.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Vintage.
• Henrik Ibsen. Ghosts. Dover Thrift.
• Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway.
• T. S. Eliot. Selected Poems. Harvest.