Modernism, Media, and Mediation

Catalog description

What was the position of literary writing among the new media technologies that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century? How did modernist writers respond to a social and political situation in which access to media and information was at once widely distributed, and consolidated by corporations and the state? This class pursues continuities between past and present, against today's claims of heroically disruptive innovation and new crises for literature. Ths course will engage key media theorists in the context of extended analyses of two major 20th-century works - James Joyce's Ulysses and Langston Hughes's Ask Your Mama - among other key intertexts of the period.