The Modernist Aesthetics and Politics
Fall 2002 Tuesday 9-12am
Prof. Liang-ya Liou

Course Description: This semester-long course will focus on twelve modernist texts. We will study the aesthetic experimentation in each of these texts. We will also look into the themes and representations of the “others” in each text, relating them to the intellectual and socio-political milieu. The critical issues we will deal with include: What is modernism (as opposed to realism and postmodernism)? Is there only one monolithic Modernism or modernisms? What is the relationship between modernism and modernity? What politics of gender, sexuality, class, and race do these modernist texts show? What is the relationship between the modernist aesthetics and politics? Theories of modernism as well as feminist theory, postcolonial theory and queer theory will be introduced in class in order for you to have a critical perspective.

Required texts:
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton)
2. James Joyce, Dubliners (Bookman)
3. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (Bookman)
4. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Bookman)
5. T. S, Eliot, “Prufrock” and The Waste Land
6. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Bookman)
7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribner)
8. Earnest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (Scribner)
9. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Bookman)
10. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Norton)
11. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton)