ENGL 20721 - Modernist Poetry and the Modern Novel

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

"We had the experience, but missed the meaning." So wrote T. S. Eliot, reflecting on a 30-year period that saw virtually the entire Western world experience a simultaneous and monumental spiritual, emotional, and intellectual crisis. Eliot's is just one of a tremendous variety of literary responses to a radically changing world that makes up the period called "modernism," in which both the world and how it was written about changed dramatically. This involves engagement with questions that are central to everyone's life - from the nature of God, love, friendship, race, sex, gender, and war, to drinking, laughing, shopping, cows, crabs, and puppy dogs (seriously). We'll be reading a variety of texts - both British and American, poetry and fiction, bridging the period between the two Great Wars (Yeats, Pound, Williams, Loy, Eliot; Ford, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Forster, Woolf, Rhys) - that, for various reasons and in myriad ways, experiment with preexisting conventional notions of genre, narrative, point of view, and language. By engaging these texts alongside short readings by the authors about their own writing, the goal of the course is to gain confidence working through texts that might otherwise be too intimidating to read in other contexts by tending to basic questions first: what did these writers and poets say themselves that they were doing, and why did they do it? Such basic questions will provide the necessary background against which the innovation and astonishing beauty of these works can take shape. As importantly, you will be introduced to an interpretive framework through which to understand literature and to think about why it matters in terms of larger social, cultural, and even personal contexts. No prior knowledge is assumed. We will cover in class methodological instruction devoted to the skills such as poetic scansion, close reading, note taking, etc. that are necessary to read, interpret, and discuss literary texts in terms of their formal elements as well as their connections to larger social, cultural, and literary contexts. The broader goal is to develop new ways of thinking about human experience and especially language that will remain long after the surface data of names, dates, and terms has faded, and to gain the confidence and skills necessary to make you feel like you can read, and think through, anything.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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