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.

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

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

Three plays by Samuel Beckett

Week 9: Modernist History and Myth

James Joyce, Ulysses (excerpts)

Week 10: The Politics and the Aesthetics of Modernism

Excerpts from various literary and theoretical works

NB: For matters relating to registration, please contact the Undergraduate Advisor directly

Evaluation and Examination

Attendance: 5%

Class Participation: 10%

Mid-term Literature Review: 35%

Final paper: 50%