The Private Life of Modernism - NEW COURSE

Instructor:
Frank Lentricchia
LS 770-97
Spring 2019
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00 pm (Note: time is slightly later than other LS courses)
GLS Conference Room
Begins January 15 - Ends April 6 (no class on March 12)

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.

About Frank Lentricchia
Literature

Frank Lentricchia, a novelist and literary critic, is the Katharine Everett Gilbert Professor Emeritus of Literature.  He received his Ph.D. from Duke in 1966 and has taught at UCLA, UC-Irvine and Rice University.  He has taught poetry, film, literature, and fiction courses.