ENGL 462E

Twentieth-Century British and Irish Studies (3 credits)

Instructor: John Cooper with Mark Deggan
Section: 004
Term: 1

Anglo-American Modernism, 1910-1940

We will examine the birth and evolution of modernism as an Anglo-American movement in the arts in the three decades from 1910 to 1940. This is the period many scholars and critics call ‘High Modernism’ although what is exactly meant by ‘high’ is not always very clear. Modernist studies now encompass so many varied topics, periods, genres, theoretical slants, and places that it may be helpful to return, as W. H. Auden once wrote in another connection, to the places where ‘long ago the accusations had begun’. The course will focus on two principal areas of interest, the relationship of modernism to the socio-historical context of its emergence, especially to its interrogation of the idea of tradition, and to modernism’s poetics, especially as those new forms of expression altered old habits of perception, cognition, and affectivity. Poets to be considered will include Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, HD, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and others. We will also read four prose works, three novels and Stein’s ‘autobiography’.

Reading list:

• Ramazani et. al. Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1 Modern Poetry.
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1924)
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
• Henry Green, Party Going (1939)

Assignments:

• Two shorter papers (500 words each): 20%
• One longer term paper (2000 words): 40%
• Final examination: 40%