COML2071 - Modernism Seminar: When was Modernism?

This class will provide a survey of international modernism by historicizing it in a non-linear manner by surveying three decades in the first half of the twentieth century. Critics agree that the year 1922 exemplifies the peak of modernism with masterpieces and canonical texts by Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Jean Toomer. We will read selections from these “monuments” and ask when modernism began, which will take us back to the pre-war years. In this second moment, we will focus on the years 1910-1913. We will examine texts by Willa Cather, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jules Romains and Guillaume Apollinaire. Finally, we will investigate the possibility of a closure by looking at passages from texts like Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! (1935), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust(1939), Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight (1939) and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941). A comparison between those “slices” of cultural history will reveal important trends, displacements and movements in the arts and literature. The years that produced modern masterpieces saw the emergence of a modern classicism, a development ushering in the mixture of the new and tradition that has become the hallmark of modernism, thus turning it into our own classicism while anticipating what has been called “postmodernism.”