The High Modernist Tradition

Catalog description

Critical, historical and interdisciplinary study of major works by Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Wilde, Hardy, and Hopkins. The emphasis will be on the joy of close reading of wonderful, powerful, and innovative individual works, all of which I love to teach. We shall place the authors and works within the context of literary, political, cultural, and intellectual history. The course will seek to define the development of literary modernism (mostly but not exclusively in England), and relate literary modernism in England to that in Europe and America as well as to other intellectual developments. We shall be especially interested in the relationship between modern literature and modern painting and sculpture. Within this course, I work closely with students as they select and develop the topics on which they write essays.