Syllabus

Professor Eve Sorum English 648
Office: Wheatley 6-002 Fall 2007
Office phone: 617-287-6753 Classroom: Wheatley 6-047
Office hours: Th 2-4 PM and by appt. Meeting time: Th 4:00-6:30
eve.sorum@umb.edu

English 648: MODERNISM IN LITERATURE

Does language create our world, or does it merely describe it? If it is the former, then what are the stakes for literature? Working with a range of novelists, poets, and theorists, this course will explore literature that engages with these questions of representation in the most innovative and exciting ways. Modernism describes not so much a definite time-span in literary and artistic history, as it does an aesthetic response to various social, moral, technological, and political transformations. We will reflect on some of the period’s most influential concepts—the disintegration of faith, the sense of epistemological uncertainty, the reorientation of the subject in space and time, the primacy of the unconscious, and the feeling of cultural dislocation—in relation to cultural and material upheavals, including urbanization, mass warfare, scientific and technological advances, conflicts about sexuality, and the women’s movement. We will read selections from thinkers like Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Pater, who acted as profound influences on modernist modes of thought, but our primary focus will be on the novels and poems that stand at the heart of definitions and debates about modernism.

Required texts

Books (available in the UMB bookstore)

• Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (Penguin) 0-14-018184-9
• Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Collier) 0-02-050987
• James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Vintage) 0-679-73989-0
• Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (Oxford) 0-19-283620-X
• T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (Yale) 0-300-11994-1
• Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 0-374-52-507-2
• Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (Scribner) 0-684-82276-8
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harvest/HBJ) 0-15-671142-7
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harvest/HBJ) 0-15-690739-9
• Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Harvest/HBJ) 0-15-694960-1
• William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (Vintage) 0-67-973218-7

Primary texts in other forms (in the order they appear on the syllabus)

[password for course eReserves site is modernism]

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html or any published version. We will focus on the second section, “Proletarians and Communists,” though I recommend reading the first section and the final paragraph of the whole piece.]
• Walter Pater, “Preface” and “Conclusion” to The Renaissance. [http://www.victorianprose.org/. Search under Pater and please download the 1901 edition (the site has several different editions). Make sure not to print the whole PDF file, since it is over 200 pages long! The Preface and Conclusion are quite short.]
• Friedrich Nietzsche, selection from The Genealogy of Morals. [Photocopy]
• Albert Einstein, selection from Relativity: The Special and the General Theory: read sections 6, 8, 9, and 10. [http://www.bartleby.com/173/]
• Wilfred Owen, poems from The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 2nd Revs. Edition. Ed. Jon Silkin. New York: Penguin, 1996. [see link on course website resource page: www.geocities.com/~bblair/owenidx.htm]
• Essays on modernist poetic theory:
o T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism.” (1914) [Photocopy]
o Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect” (1918) [Use any published version or access it at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/retrospect.htm]
o T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) [Use any published for or you can access it at http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html]
o Randall Jarrell, “The End of the Line” (1947) [eReserves]
• Selected poems: [photocopies and eReserves]
o W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan”
o T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
o Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
o Marianne Moore, “The Steeple-Jack”
o H. D., “Sea Rose”

Criticism (in the order that it appears on the syllabus)
• Daylanne English, “Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Literary-Medical Experimentation.” Literature and Medicine 16.2 (1997): 188-209. [Project Muse]
• Sara Van Den Berg, “ Reading Dora Reading: Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” From In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism, 2nd edition. Eds. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. 294-304. [Photocopy]
• James Fairhall, “Growing into History.” Ch. 4 from James Joyce and the Question of History. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. 112-160. [Photocopy]
• Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, “The Good Soldier and the War for British Modernism.” Modern Fiction Studies 45.2 (1999): 303-339. [Project Muse]
• Jim Barloon, “Very Short Stories: The Miniaturization of War in Hemingway’s In Our Time.” The Hemingway Review 24. 2 (Spring 2005): 5-17. [Project Muse]
• Tammy Clewell, “Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War, and Modernist Mourning.” Modern Fiction Studies 50. 1 (Spring 2004): 197-223. [Project Muse]
• Ronald Bush, “Modernist Poetry and Poetics.” From The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century English Literature. Eds. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. 232-50. [eReserves]
• Michael North, selection from Chapter 2, “T. S. Eliot: Conservatism” in The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. 81-106. [eReserves]
• Paul Peppis, “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology.” Modernism/Modernity 9.4 (2002): 561-580 [Project Muse]
• Paul Armstrong, “Reading India: E. M. Forster and the Politics of Interpretation.” Twentieth Century Literature 38. 4 (Winter 1992): 365-385. [JSTOR]
• Jessica Berman, “Of Oceans and Opposition: The Action of The Waves.” From Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. 139-156. [eReserves]
• Barbara Ladd, “‘The Direction of the Color Line’: Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom! Absalom!.” American Literature 66. 3 (Sept. 1994): 525-551. [JSTOR]

Course Policies

Requirements and Attendance: I expect you to fulfill all of the requirements of the course in a timely fashion. Your grade will be determined from the following elements: participation: 10%; annotated bibliography and class discussion: 20%; review: 30%; research paper/project: 40%. With a once-a-week meeting, attendance at every class is imperative.

Accommodations for disabilities: I am happy to accommodate students with disabilities. If you have a disability and feel you will need accommodations in order to complete course requirements, please contact the Ross Center for Disability Services (Campus Center 2nd Floor, Room 2010) at (617) 287-7430.

Required Work

1. Annotated bibliography, article assignment, and discussion facilitation
You will notice spaces placed next to each week in the syllabus (sometimes one, sometimes two). I will ask you to choose one week to sign up to be in charge of creating an annotated bibliography, assigning a critical article, and facilitating discussion of that article in relation to the primary text. Here is a more detailed breakdown of each of these elements:

• Annotated bibliography: Please create an annotated bibliography of at least FIVE recent (since approximately 1985) critical articles, chapters, or books on the primary text assigned for that week. If there is more than one primary text, choose one of them; if two people are signed up for that week, you are free to discuss the bibliographies with each other and have overlapping materials, but please each write your own. Each annotation should include the bibliographic information and several sentences that provide a summary of the piece. A copy of the bibliography should be handed to me in class, as well as emailed to me so that I can post it on our course website.

• Article assignment: You will choose one article from your bibliography to assign to the class to read. If two people are doing bibliographies that week, you may either agree upon one article to assign, or each choose a separate article (the article that I pair with the text will not be required reading on the days that there are two presenters). You will need to decide on this article by the TUESDAY before class in order to give everyone time to read it! If the article is available online (through JSTOR or Project Muse, for example), then you simply need to provide the source information to the class. If it is from a printed text, please get me a photocopy of the selection by Tuesday at 12PM (you can put it in my mailbox) and I will make photocopies for the class. The photocopies will be available in the box outside my office door.

• Discussion facilitation: In class that week you will facilitate the discussion of your assigned article. (If two people are signed up, they may either facilitate the discussion together or focus on their own article.) You should meet with me before class to talk about how you want to organize the discussion as a whole. Since talking about your selection will inevitably be connected to discussion of the primary text(s), you will also be generally responsible for the broader discussion that day.

2. Review of article
One week after you have lead the class in discussing your chosen article, you should hand in a short (5-7 double-spaced pages) review of the article. This review should involve contextualizing this article in relation to the other criticism you read, as well as analyzing how the critic approaches the primary text and what the payoffs and drawbacks are to this approach (i.e. what it teaches us).

3. Research paper/curriculum project
This final project is a research paper (approximately 20 pages). Alternately, if you are working on a M.A. degree for teaching, you may consider doing a curriculum project on a text/author of your choice. Your project may grow out of your work on your bibliography, but it may also be on a totally different text.

Syllabus

What is modernism?
Week 1: September 6
The intellectual tradition: selections from Marx & Engels, Nietzsche, Pater, and Einstein.

Restructuring language, mind, and identity
Week 2: September 13
Language and meaning: Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” and Three Lives
Criticism: Daylanne English: “Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Literary-Medical Experimentation”
___________

Week 3: September 20
Implications of the unconscious: the modern character: Freud’s Dora and Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
Criticism: Sara Van Den Berg, “ Reading Dora Reading: Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”
___________

Week 4: September 27
Rethinking the bildungsroman: Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Criticism: James Fairhall, “Growing into History”
___________

Week 5: October 4
A new narrator: Ford’s The Good Soldier
Criticism: Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, “The Good Soldier and the War for British Modernism”
___________

WWI and the language of modernism
Week 6: October 11
Reporting from the trenches: Wilfred Owen poems and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time
Criticism: (Recommended) Jim Barloon, “Very Short Stories: The Miniaturization of War in Hemingway’s In Our Time”
___________; ___________

Week 7: October 18
Mourning and memory: Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Criticism: (Recommended) Tammy Clewell, “Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War, and Modernist Mourning”
___________; ___________

Poetic modernisms
Week 8: October 25
Aesthetic formulations and manifestos: Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”; Pound, “A Retrospect”; Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; Jarrell, “The End of the Line.” Poems: Yeats, “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan”; Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”; Marianne Moore, “The Steeple-Jack”; H. D. “Sea Rose.”
Criticism: Ronald Bush, “Modernist Poetry and Poetics”
___________

Week 9: November 1 [CLASS CANCELLED due to conference];
Schedule individual meetings for earlier in the week to discuss interests for final project.

Week 10: November 8
A new poetic topography: Eliot’s The Waste Land
Criticism: (Recommended) Michael North, from The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound
___________; ___________

Week 11: November 15
Gendered modernisms: Mina Loy’s The Lost Lunar Baedeker
Criticism: Paul Peppis, “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology”
___________

Week 12: November 22
NO CLASS—Thanksgiving

Race, nation, and narrative voice
Week 13: November 29
Modernism and colonialism: Forster’s A Passage to India
Criticism (Recommended): Paul Armstrong, “Reading India: E. M. Forster and the Politics of Interpretation”
___________; ___________

Week 14: December 6
Identity and Englishness: Woolf’s The Waves
Criticism: Jessica Berman, “Of Oceans and Opposition: The Action of The Waves”
___________

Week 15: December 13
The American South: Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!
Criticism: Barbara Ladd, “‘The Direction of the Howling’: Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom! Absalom!”
___________

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Article and Snack Schedule

Week 2: September 13—Stein
Article: Itai Halevi
Snack: Jaffney Roode

Week 3: September 20—Freud
Article:
Snack: Joe Fitzgerald

Week 4: September 27—Joyce
Article: Jaffney Roode and Aaron Zak
Snack: Justin Jourdan

Week 5: October 4—Ford
Article and snack: Jeremy Blaustein

Week 6: October 11—Owen and Hemingway
Article: Kate Fay and Grace Mlady
Snack: Shelly Karren

Week 7: October 18—Woolf TTL
Article: Gerard Teichman and Joe Fitzgerald
Snack: Gerard Teichman

Week 8: October 25—Manifestos and various poems
Article: Teri Torchia
Snack: Jon Molinaro

Week 10: November 8—Eliot
Article: George Kovach and Shelly Karren
Snack: George Kovach

Week 11: November 15—Loy
Article: Jon Molinaro
Snack: Teri Torchia

Week 13: November 29—Forster
Article: Justin Jourdan and Jackie Partyka
Snack: John Lewis

Week 14: December 6—Woolf Waves
Article: John Lewis
Snack: Aaron Zak and Kate Fay

Week 15: December 13—Faulkner
Article:
Snack: Jackie Partyka and Grace Mlady