English

This seminar studies literary and artistic production during the Modernist era, seen as a period of crisis that is both a moment of rupture and a critical moment in the field of art and literature after the First World War. It covers Picasso’s Cubism; Bartok’s and Stravinsky’s music; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet; and the European literary scene including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence in Great Britain; and Marcel Proust and André Gide in France. The course also examines this new literary “modernity” in American fiction, including Dos Passos’s 1919 (1932), Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT (1934). Each novel provides an opportunity to study the tension between satiric representation and formal experimentation, or the “creative violence” characteristic of Modernism. The second part of the course looks at how modernist writers engage with ordinary life and objects, not only from a phenomenological standpoint as they explore the sensible aspect of subject/object relationships, but also from a political one underwritten by gender and economic considerations. The course considers how numerous, sometimes uncanny, encounters with daily matter in modernist fiction are not only critical in the characters’ existence but also of the materialistic and consumerist turn of 20th century society.

This subject examines Romanticism from the perspective of the massive, though long neglected, cultural force of women writers and readers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It locates the emergence of feminism in this historical context, when, in the wake of the French revolution, changing notions of literature, culture, sexuality and emancipation gave rise to the first concerted articulation of feminist ideas in modern European culture. Through close readings of some of the best writers of the last two centuries, including Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and others, students gain a firm understanding of the literary, philosophical and cultural foundations of Romanticism and early Feminism movement that have played key roles in the construction of the modern world.

This course explores the 18th century's fascination with the body and constructions of the self by considering literary representations of the body. Ideals of beauty are examined, as well as anxieties surrounding sexuality and the roles of both men and women, as masculinities and femininities are debated with regards to cultural production. The course also investigates material considerations, reflecting on clothing and disguise, as well as considering the body in relation to discourses of travel and the military. Slavery, incarceration, and the body in pain are particular concerns in writing from this period, and theories engaging with class and race inform our analysis of various relationships and power structures. Students also investigate how authors consider the physical and emotional response of their readers in achieving their aims, and engage with disability studies in considering these authors and their characters in terms of 18th-century concepts of defectiveness. This course explores the 18th-century body across a range of genres, engaging with novels, poetry, and a play, as well as discussing examples of life writing, including letters and biography.