Women Making Modernism

Catalog description

Modernism as a movement touched on and altered many forms of art from literature to painting and sculpture, to architecture, to dance, to film. It was a highly experimental, sometimes radical, and deeply politically and aesthetically engaged era at the turn of the last century when, as the poet Ezra Pound exclaimed, artists had to 'make it NEW'! What 'it' was and what 'new' meant were up for grabs. Everything about art, life, living, identity, and meaning was up for renovation and remaking. Women writers were especially interested in the possibilities and problems for what it might mean to live anew, without the constraints and formalities of how culture had historically conformed gender, class, racial, and national identities for them. In this course, we will be reading a series of novels, poems, essays, and manifestoes from British and American women writers (1900-1950) that will give you a sense for how different women writers responded to the opportunities and challenges of self-expression in this era, and what resonances their writings continue to have in our own times. Some writers may include: Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks.