COMP 366
Joyce, Woolf, and Proust
Last Offered Fall 2019
Division I
Cross-listed ENGL 325 / COMP 366
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This seminar focuses on novels by three of the most important writers of modernist fiction: Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way, the first novel of his sequence In Search of Lost Time); Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse); and James Joyce (Ulysses, read in slightly abridged form). By juxtaposing these path breaking texts, we will examine the distinctive yet related ways in which they explore crucial preoccupations of modernism: the threat and the exhilaration of cultural loss in face of social and political transformations in the early twentieth century; the turn to memory, to art, and to objects as stays against de-stabilized subjectivity and as means of re-thinking value; the emergence of new forms of political and sexual identity; the heightening of consciousness to the verge of transport or disintegration; and the roots and perversities of desire. Students who have studied Ulysses in a previous course are welcome.