2015-2016 Graduate Academic Catalogue 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2015-2016 Graduate Academic Catalogue [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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LS 632 - Tradition and Revolt in Literature: Twentieth-Century Modernism(s)

(3.00 cr.)

This course explores the complexities of the literary movement known as modernism and examines the shift in scholarly understanding from a single "modernism" to multiple "modernisms." For much of the twentieth century, the term modernism described the works of a limited number of writers, usually T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. In an age dominated by accelerated industrialization, urbanization, the first global war, and new technologies which transformed daily life, these writers redefined the nature of literary expression, developing literary forms such as stream-of-consciousness narrative, free verse, the long poem, and imagism to express their twentieth-century experience. Yet there were many other authors, African American writers, working class writers, feminist writers, and popular writers writing at the same time whose poems, novels, stories, and plays were excluded from the conventional scholarly definition of modernism. Nonetheless their works illuminate new angles of vision and express sometimes startling perspectives on early twentieth-century modernity. By pairing canonical and marginal texts, the course attempts to determine what makes a text modern.



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