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Style Sheet    Calendar    Reserves  Other Modernists

TEXTS:

THE SENIOR SEMINAR

Welcome to the end of your college career as an English major -- almost.  

Before you receive your degree, you've got to show that you're able to pull together everything you've learned in four years here into one course and, primarily, into one essay from one course.   This is your senior seminar.

Senior seminars act as capstones to the major.  They display your reading abilities, your writing abilities, your research abilities, your academic responsibility, your intellectual perspicacity, your endurance, your perseverance, the sum total of all that you've learned during your disciplinary studies.  They ask you to read more, write more and do more than you've ever done before because they are, in essence, the final exam to your whole major.  

This course will be twice as much work and twice as hard as normal classes, and it ought to be.  I expect you to sweat, cuss, and bleed English during this semester.   

Doesn't mean that we won't have fun nor that you won't learn more than you thought possible.  It just means we're going to have to work for it.  

MODERNISM        

The word "Modernism" is sort of confusing because it can refer to both a historical period and an artistic style.  That is, for us, it denotes a set of years as well as a set of writers and styles.  However, those periods and styles differ depend on whom you're listening to.  Some say modernism began shortly after 1900 and ended by @1930; others (like one course I took in grad school) starts Modernism in the teens and takes it clear through the mid- to late- fifties.  So, what are we to do?  Why do so many people take the "period" so wide-rangingly?

Well, part of the reason that time gets messed up is because the sorts of things that make modernism "Modernism" are stylistic innovation, a re-thinking of what it means to be a writer and of  literature (or art in general, since it's not just a literary phenomena), language in play, items which roared in early and kept rolling relatively late.  These things begin to proliferate around 1910 and then keep on going in various ways, shapes and forms until about 1960.  It's then that we might reach a cutting off point.  This course is actually going to settle around a section of that period which has been called "High Modernism" (centering on 1922, the year both Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's "The Wasteland" were published) simply because it gives a good, concise feeling for the sorts of things that we have come to call modern.

In order to discuss what modern is, let's look at a couple of examples of what modern isn't.  Thus, this Tennyson (Victorian) and Wee Willie Winkie and something post-modern, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (from start of "Differance," page 3, Margins of Philosophy).  On the one hand we have what sounds to be very out of date and now revived mostly in Christmas cards (indeed, Victorianism is coming back into fashion after the mass spending of the 80's--it's like happier memories cast one-hundred years back) and, on the other, something that sounds like we understand it, but which just doesn't quite seem to make sense.  To break it down grammatically, the former is bombastic and the last one elliptical or opaque.  It sounds as if we should understand it--we understand almost all of its words--but their usage is odd, somehow, their meaning doesn't quite reach us.  If this is the case, then, what is modernism?

Modernism is what this is not.  On the one hand, it is not bombastic.  Modernists were interested in their various ways of boiling language down to its bare descriptive minimums.  Like all generalizations about any literary period, this is certainly not always the case, but it is often the case.  On the other hand, this process did not mean that modernists used the same diction that you and I use.  Instead, they drew on vast learning and expected us to keep up.  Whereas the passage from Derrida takes for granted a similar familiarity with philosophy--both his own and those who preceded him--even if you knew those works, there is no guarantee that you'd "get" what I just read.  The modernists, however, when they drew off other mythologies, like those of the Romans and Greeks, knew that, if you got their references, you were more than likely going to "get" their works.  This is certainly not always the case.  Someone like MacDiarmid (or Joyce in Finnegan's Wake) uses too many illusions to track down and, many times, they'd be of little practical use, nonetheless.  However, writers like Eliot, HD, Joyce (of Ulysses) and even Ezra Pound use myth as a base structure for their work and understanding these myths can mightily help our understanding of their works.

So, modernism is mind games.  Serious mind games.  How much do you know?  How much are you willing to learn in order to learn to read these texts?  Moreover, how much are you willing to put up with in order to get through this literature?  Because, like you, most people in the teens and twenties couldn't simply "read" these texts the way that English teachers (especially) do now.  The audiences had to learn to read "The Wasteland" and Ulysses, even though everyone knew they were important from the start.  Its only been in the last twenty years or so that the Harlem Renaissance writers and figures like HD and MacDiarmid have been read as serious modernists, with important takes (both literarily and historically) on the period.  What I want to do is to introduce you to a bunch of the figures, give you a way or two of entering into the worlds they create and, most of all, give you some feel for what it is we mean what we say "modernist."  

In either case, the phrase "modern" does not simply mean contemporary; that has the overtones of a New Age all over it.  These writers saw themselves in a line of great writers, each of whom did some radically new thing with the language.  Thus, they were both a part of what we call canonical literature and outside of it all at once.  In their own minds they were the equals of Shakespeare, Chaucer, et al.  To many others of the day they were crackpot weirdos who don't belong in that company at all.  Today, we tend to think of them in both worlds, though more and more in the land of the first.

So, what do I want you to know about modernism at this incipient moment?  Well, most importantly, that there is no one phenomena that we can point to and say "Ah, Modernism!"  It was too diverse ever to have been this.  At the same time, you ought to be able to understand that modernism was literature that was historically connected to the moment of its writing.  It dealt with the world at a particular moment--a world before and between two world wars, at the hour when the horse and buggy went out and the Ford came in, when science made leaps and bounds daily, when no passports were needed to travel the world (or the European Continent at least), when a depression followed a war boom and yet when the wealthy were creating the myth of the Roaring Twenties, where people of letters still mattered (at least some of these people were stars), where Picassos could be had for $20.00 and often less, where the world as we know it was only forming.  In this setting, modernism flourished.  For this course, then, I want to look at both what modernism looked like and what it said about the world it was in.

THE COURSE

Though the Calendar will let you know what readings and assignments are due when, there are several key elements to think about up-front.

PLAGIARISM

There should be absolutely no reason to have to say this in a senior seminar syllabus, but I will anyway.  It's very simple:  if you copy someone else's direct words or exact ideas -- intentionally or not -- without giving them credit you fail the class.  Universities and colleges are built upon the notion that ideas matter; if you plagiarize someone else's ideas, you're denying that fundamental tenet.  Thus there will be zero tolerance for plagiarism in here.  If you do it, you will fail the course, period.  And that means you fail the major itself.  (Please see also p. 26 "Academic Dishonesty" in the college's 2000-01 catalog and p. 95 ff. of Buscemi's The Basics.)

CALENDAR

Reserves

As I already told you, I've put a number of texts on reserve in the library.  Below you'll find a list of them, so that if you go looking for something on-line or on the shelves you've got a better shot at finding it quickly.  More will be added as the semester progresses.

Bishop, Edward.  Virginia Woolf.  New York : St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Bloom, Harold.  Modern Critical Interpretations of “The Waste Land.”  New York:  Chelsea House, 1986.

Bloom, Harold. Yeats.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Bold, Alan.  Hugh MacDiarmid:  The Terrible Crystal.  London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1983.

Bold, Alan.  MacDiarmid.  London:  Paladin, 1990.

Bradbury, Malcolm.  Modernism.  New York:  Penguin, 1985.  This is a terrific place to start a general study of the various elements that come together in modernism(s).

Brown, Dennis.  The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature:  A Study in Self-Fragmentation.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Cantor, Norman and Mindy Cantor.  Twentieth-Century Culture:  Modernism to Deconstruction.  New York: Peter Lang, 1988.  This is a general cultural history of the period, which might be useful for background to whatever project you might be working on.

Chace, William M. Joyce:  A Collection of Critical Essays.  Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Chefdor, Monique.  Modernism:  Challenges and Perspectives.  Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Ellmann, Richard.  Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Ellmann, Richard.  James Joyce.  New York : Oxford University Press, 1982.

Gorra, Michael.  The English Novel at Mid-Century.  New York : St. Martin's Press, 1990.

Hart, Clive.  James Joyce’s Dubliners.  New York: Viking Press, 1969.

Herbert, W.N. To Circumjack MacDiarmid:  The Poetry and Prose of Hugh MacDiarimid.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Jameson, Fredric.  The Political Unconscious.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.  This one is by the most esteemed American Marxist critic and has some good material on novels, particularly those of Conrad.  The last chapter might also be useful.  Jameson has also written books on Lewis and the position of the artist in late capitalist society, if you're interested in such things. 

Jeffares, A. Norman.  W. B. Yeats:  Man and Poet.  New York:Barnes & Noble, 1966.  Like Bloom, Kenner and Ellman, Jeffares is one of the old-school critics, people who long-considered the works and figures they're writing about.

Kenner, Hugh.  The Pound Era.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. This is a landmark study, of Pound and of his times as well.

Kostelanetz, Richard.  Gertrude Stein Advanced: An Anthology of Criticism.  Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, 1990.

MacDiarmid, Hugh.  Collected Poems. New York: MacMillan, 1962.

MacDiarmid, Hugh.  A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.  Boston:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1971.  This long poem in Scots is MacDiarmid's masterwork, well worth the time it takes to work through its language and imagery.

Martin, Jay.  A Collection of Critical Essays on “The Waste Land.”  Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Meisel, Perry.  The Myth of the Modern:  A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850.  New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1987.  Meisel is a key critical figure in modern studies.  This might be worth glancing at even if you're not sure what you're going to do for your own project.

Menand, Louis.  Discovering Modernism:  T.S. Eliot and His Context.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1987.

Mepham, John.  Virginia Woolf:  Cricitism in Focus.  New York : St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Moody, A. David.  The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Partridge, A.C. The Language of Modern Poetry. London : Deutsch, 1976.  Wanna detailed accounting of how modern(ist) poets use their language(s)?  This is it.

Riach, Alan.  Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry.  Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

Scott, Bonnie Kime.  The Gender of Modernism:  A Critical Anthology.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Stead, C.K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984.

Stewart, Allegra.  Gertrude Stein and the Present.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Sultan, Stanley.  Eliot, Joyce, and Company.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Surette, Leon.  The Birth of Modernism:  Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult.  Montreal:  MaGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993.

Symons, Julian.  Makers of the New:  The Revolution in Literature, 1914-1939.  New York: Random House, 1987.

Werner, Craig Hansen.  Dubliners:  A Student’s Companion to the Stories.  Boston : Twayne Publishers, c1988.

Yeats, W.B. Essays and Introductions.  New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Yeats, W.B.  Selected Poems and Two Plays. Ed. ML Rosenthal. New York: Collier Books, 1962.

Other Modernists

Here is a bulleted lists of other authors you might want to think about/explore as you're working toward your final essays.  They are important figures in their own rights, but we simply didn't have time to cover them in here.  (Especial apologies to Lawrence but the plain fact is I don't like him, so I don't teach him!)