Modernism

AY2015/2016 Semester 1

This course surveys Modernist Literature in English, spanning from the turn of the century to the 1930s. This time period is marked by developments that were both exciting and disturbing for artists: Heisenberg?s ?uncertainty principle?; Einstein?s theory of relativity (1913-6); WWI (1914-1918), which silenced the suffrage movement in England and resulted in historical, geographical, psychological, and cultural fragmentation; the Easter Rising in Dublin (1916); the world reinterpreted through Marx, Freud, Darwin and Nietzsche; an accelerated growth of capitalism and industry; and technological modernization through inventions like the telephone, phonograph, wireless, x-ray, cinema, automobile, and airplane, all of which changed our sense of time and space. These radical shifts often resulted in a sense of anxiety: a loss of faith in reliable narratives, language, and the role of the artist. Artists also, however, saw this change as opening new ways of representing the world, allowing them to create new systems of meaning through their artistic forms and aesthetics. Together, we will close read the literature of this period in order to begin to understand the preoccupations and formal innovations of the modernist writer.