The Private Life of Modernism

This is a class about how modernist artists represent the inner life of their characters.  It is a class on the techniques—often radical—deployed to display hidden subjectivity even as these artists put before us an available public world.  The representation of subjectivity was a central feature of the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century.  Thus, modernism may be viewed as an extension via techniques not before seen of Romantic preoccupations. We will be reading across literary genres—drama (Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard), fiction (Hemingway’s Nick Adams short stories and Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying), poetry (Wallace Stevens), and the avant-garde film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni's L’Avventura and Blowup.  As time allows, James Joyce’s short story, The Dead.

 

Requirements:  4 short essays; faithful and prompt attendance.  No final exam.

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