What, when, and where was Modernism? This course introduces students, whatever their background, to the historical evolution and the variations of the idea of Modernism provided by the European tradition. Our primary authors are Yeats, Eliot, Mann, Woolf, Beckett, and Joyce.

Week 1: Modernity, the Modern and Modernism

Week 2: Hermeneutics of Suspicion I
The Modernist Spirit of Nietzsche
W B Yeats, The Collected Poems of W B Yeats

Week 3: Hermeneutics of Suspicion II
The Modernist Spirit of Marx
T S Eliot, The Waste Land

Week 4: Hermeneutics of Suspicion III
The Modernist Spirit of Freud
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Week 5: Literature Review and Midterm exam

Week 6: The Language of Modernism
Saussure and the ‘Linguistic Turn’
T S Eliot, Four Quartets

Week 7: The Gender of Modernism
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own

Week 8: The World of Modernism
Martin Heidegger and ‘Being in the World’
Samuel Beckett, Happy days

Week 9: Modernist History and Myth
James Joyce, Ulysses

Week 10: The Politics and the Aesthetics of Modernism
Excerpts from various literary and theoretical works