ENGLISH 609.44 - Theorizing Late Modernism

Instructor: Dr. Harry Vandervlist

Tuesday, 9:00 - 11:30

Mail to: vandervl [at] ucalgary [dot] ca

Course Description:

Critical accounts of Modernist literature which privilege the High Modernist heyday of the 1910s and 1920s find themselves challenged by writing from the 1930s and 1940s. In the late 1920s and through the 1930s and 1940s, authors such as Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Wyndham Lewis and others seemed to abandon several beliefs associated with High Modernist theory and practice. These include the belief in the heroic artist; in the power of stylistic mastery; in the redemptive capacity of art; or in the artist's capacity to discern or shape an aesthetic order that would confer a meaningful organization upon the perceptions of modern life. Several theorists (including Charles Jencks in architecture, Fredric Jameson in cultural theory, and Alan Wilde and Tyrus Miller in literature) have recognized the need for a stylistic and chronological category such as "late modernism" in order to clarify the important distinctions between writers whose careers overlapped, but who differed substantially in both their artistic practices and their implicit or explicit views about literature.

This course will begin by reviewing seminal accounts of modernism itself. We will then examine the hypothesis that there is an identifiable difference between "modernism" and "late modernism." We will read the literary texts which have led theorists and critics to propose such a distinction: Beckett's Watt, Loy's Insel, Barnes' Ryder and Nightwood (and others to be determined). In addition, we will revisit some High Modernist writing in order to provide context for later texts. In class discussions and student papers, members of the class will construct their own critical accounts of the works we read, while engaging with the arguments for and against recognizing "late modernism" as a distinct and useful category. Student seminars and a critical paper will furnish the basis for evaluation.

(Some experience with twentieth century literature would be an asset for those taking the course.)

Texts (this is a provisional list):

Primary texts:

Joyce, from Ulysses; from Finnegans Wake

Woolf, from Mrs. Dalloway

Beckett, Samuel Murphy, Watt

Loy, Insel

Barnes, Nightwood (Dalkey Archive Press edition)

 

Theory and Criticism (this is a provisional list):

Wilde, Alan. "The Aesthetics of Crisis" from Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination

from Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Jencks, Charles. "Postmodern vs. Late-Modern"

From Conrad, Peter. Modern Times, Modern Places.

Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Art Between the World Wars

Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms; A Literary Guide