Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission

Recent offerings:

Spring 2009, Cowan

This course is unapologetically about “High Modernism.” We will examine the notion of a modernist literature and study works traditionally considered masterpieces of the British modernist canon. The approach will be historical and cultural. Our consideration of “modernism” will necessarily involve some attention to the knotty issue of “postmodernism.” Our discussions should also include current reevaluations of “modernism.” The emphasis will be on poetry although we will also read representative novels.

Possible texts may include:

• Poems by Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Wyndham Lewis, Oscar  Wilde, T. S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney
• Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent or Heart of Darkness
• Walter Pater, The Renaissance
• Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
• Rebecca West, Harriet Hume or The Return of the Soldier
• James Joyce, Dubliners
• Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway

Back to Graduate Courses