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.

• We start with a look 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.
• Next, we examine the avant-garde movements that flourished before World War I, such as Cubism, Futurism, 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.
• Our central unit studies the social impact and literary representation of World War I, one of the century’s most cataclysmic events, through the poets of WWI, James Joyce's Ulysses (excerpts), T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, among others. The war traumatized a generation of men and women, while giving birth to modernity and many features of life as we know it today.
• Finally, to round out our discussion of the new voices of modernism, we turn to Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s Cane, Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground,” and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, a novel about the modern complications of gender and sexuality.

Skills you'll develop in this course, in addition to learning about an intense period of history and literature, include close reading and textual analysis, summarizing and assessing critical articles, and conducting research on literary works and their context. Assignments include online discussion, 3 short papers, and final project (variety of formats allowed).

Requirements satisfied by this course:

For English majors, this course fulfills the breadth requirement in a) period studies, or c) genre/thematic study. It also fulfills the English department diversity requirement based on its coverage of issues of race and gender in modernism as well as the inclusion of authors from a diversity of backgrounds.