ENGL 350
Modernism and the Problem of Modernity Spring 2016
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed COMP 349
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Historically, “modernity” refers roughly to the last four centuries, a time that saw the rise of the scientific revolution, market economies, industrialized production, and mass democracy. Such developments radically altered the world, producing, for many, a disorienting experience of rupture with tradition and the past. All, to be sure, in the name of progress, for the Enlightenment regarded modernity as a fundamentally moral project, one that would reduce human suffering by means of science and technology, increase the authority of reason in public life, and extend individual rights to ever more classes of people. At the same time, however, the Enlightenment cast unacknowledged shadows of its own making: distinctively modern ills like colonial exploitation, mechanized warfare, and widespread feelings of rootlessness and anomie. Progress and good bound up so tightly with loss and evil, it is no wonder that modernity struck (and still strikes) many living through it as a “problem”: is modernity a good, but unfinished, project? Or is it, rather, some kind of fateful error, which will lead to the devastation of the natural world without, and human nature within? Will it make us freer and our lives more meaningful? Or is the freedom it promises chimerical? And can life any longer have real meaning in an impersonal world dominated by mass culture and technology? Such anxious doubts haunt modernity, and late 19th and early 20th-century texts that give them forceful expression will be the focus of this tutorial, including: Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, Horkheimer and Adorno’sDialectic of Enlightenment, James’ The Portrait of a Lady, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Beckett’s Endgame.
The Class: Format: tutorial
Limit: 10
Expected: 10
Class#: 3340
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: typical tutorial format: 5-pg paper every other week, 2-pg response other weeks.
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
COMP 349 Division I ENGL 350 Division I

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