COMP 200
European Modernism--and Its Discontents
Last Offered Spring 2018
Division I
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Class Details

What is/was Modernism? An artistic movement? A new dynamic and sensibility? A transformative response to changed conditions? All these and more? This course will attempt to deal with such issues via examination of certain key works spanning the years 1850-1930. Topics to be considered: the rise of industrial capitalism and the literary market, advances in science and technology, urban alienation and social conflict, anti-“bourgeois” stances, the displacement of religion, the fragmented self, the proliferation of multiple perspectives, the breaks with the past and privileging of the present, and the horrors of war. To be studied: poetry by Baudelaire, Yeats, and Neruda; prose fiction by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, and Woolf; drama by Beckett; Futurist and Surrealist manifestoes; German Expressionist films; and theoretical writings by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, and Benjamin. In addition, select portions of Bell-Villada’s Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life and Peter Gay’s Modernism will serve as general background to the course. All readings in English.
The Class: Format: lecture; discussion
Limit: 20
Expected: 20
Class#: 3840
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: class participation, brief weekly journals, one class presentation, three 6-page papers, a mid-term, and a final
Prerequisites: none; first-year students must consult with the instructor before registering for this course
Enrollment Preferences: students considering a major in Comparative Literature
Distributions: Division I

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