Course Description and Objectives:
This course aims to familiarize students – even those primarily focused on English/British literature – with the European-wide ferment in the arts of both the “Avant-Garde” and “High Modernism” in the first third of the twentieth century. We will be reading three novels and a play in their entirety, plus selections from a number of other texts – primary and secondary – from the modernist period. Finally, there will be a critical dimension each week, a secondary text the presentation of which will be the task of the students over the course of the semester (depending on enrolment, one “secondary work” presentation per student). Students are required to pursue an individual research project (for a semester-final paper) according to their own interests using primary or secondary material from the class or integrating outside Modernist material, and are especially encouraged to work in their chosen second foreign language (French, German, Italian, Spanish) in addition to working in the collectivity of the seminar on the main material, in English or in English translation. The course ought to give first-year students a strong initial exposure to modernist literature and second-year students who are already interested in modernism a chance to explore more fully a particular writer or issue, perhaps with the thesis in mind.