5623.900 Literary Modernism and Literary Culture
Ronald Schleifer

Literary Modernism and Literary Culture is a seminar designed to explore the cultural phenomena of literary modernism from the vantage of our (postmodern) position in the late twentieth century. The course will examine the great themes of early twentieth-century literary and cultural history: the new lower middle class; the politics of imperialism; modernism and gender; and changing conceptions of knowledge and subjectivity. Each week, we will read a major modernist author - Conrad, Hardy, Joyce, Woolf, West, Lawrence, Eliot, Forster, Achebe - in conjunction with cultural texts of one sort or another. These will include a selections from cultural histories of modernism (Kern, Said, and others), a literary history (Sheri Benstock's Women of the Left Bank), selections from Freud, Heisenberg, Saussure, Bakhtin, etc. Term papers will be designed in consultation with the instructor to allow students to pursue work that will fulfill the needs of the seminar in relation to their larger educational goals. Members of the seminar will be encouraged to aim at a publishable article for their project, and early in the semester a post-seminar meeting will be scheduled for members of our class and other interested students to discuss strategies for article writing. Drafts as well as the final paper will be discussed in writing tutorials, and the final paper will be due in time for final revisions if necessary.