This course will consider the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on six important British Modernists. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche sketches his notion of the overman, and the concept of eternal return. How do these ideas influence the novels of Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair, the poetry and prose of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound? In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian influences. How does this opposition in manifest in the novels of DH Lawrence and James Joyce? We’ll begin with these questions, but by no means end there. In addition to the two texts by Nietzsche mentioned above, we’ll read (contingent upon text availability) Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sinclair’s Mary Oliver, and Woolf’s The Waves, together with selected poems and essays by Eliot and Pound.

Course Requirements: Class members will write a two to three page paper addressing the influence of Nietzsche on each literary author, and an eight to ten page term paper analyzing some aspect of Nietzsche across several literary texts.