This course explores the literature of “Modernism,” a cultural upheaval in Europe and the United States during the early twentieth century. Modernist artists and writers challenged long-held conventions of form and content, with new voices of women and writers of color entering the conversation. 

• One of the themes of this course is vision. Modernist authors disrupted conventional ways of seeing the world. To reveal their vision of reality, they experimented with new forms of representation, often inspired by modernist painting. Their new forms of representation often seem distorted and strange, causing us to revise our own conception of the world.
• We begin by looking at the waning nineteenth century and the European colonization of Africa, which sets the stage for the racial and gender politics of the century to come. Our primary reading here is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a work of witness that shocked its original readers, as it may also shock you, though for different reasons. Conrad's message to Europe was that the darkness they feared lay within themselves. 
• Next, we examine the avant-garde movements that flourished before World War I, including Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and Vorticism, which revolutionized artistic styles and the relationship of writer to audience. We will inquire into the role of women in the avant-garde, with case studies of the collaborations of Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, Mina Loy and the Italian Futurists, and Rebecca West and the Vorticist movement.
• World War I ruptured ordinary lives and history itself, and modernist literature is largely an attempt to process and represent this cataclysmic event. Our theme in this unit is mourning. After reading poetry by soldiers who fought in the war, we turn to responses by W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, learning about the poetic genre of the elegy. 
• Almost all the important voices of modernism were those of cultural outsiders to London: Irish, American, Black, and female. We conclude our course with two novels from marginalized authors that scrutinize the existing social order and open out towards new possibilities for more equitable human flourishing: Jean Toomer’s Cane and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
• Along with weekly discussion contributions, students will write three short papers, including a take-home final.