ENGL 7563: Transatlantic Modernism (Fall 2022)

Submitted by admin on Tue, 01/16/2024 - 12:20

Week 1 ( 8/23)

Introduction; In-class activity

 

Week 2 (8/30) – Ezra Pound’s Transatlantic Revolution

Vincent Sherry, “Introduction: A History of ‘Modernism’” (handout).

Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, “Introduction” and Ch. 1: “The Emergence of ‘     Modernism’” (handout).

Optional: Robert Scholes and Cliff Wulfman, “Ezra Pound, Founder of Modern Periodical Studies” (handout)

March 1918 issue of The Little Review (Chicago) and January-February 1919 issue of The Egoist (London) at Modernist Journals Project.

 

Week 3 (9/6) – World War I & Dada

MoMA

 

World War I Poems (D)

  • Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier”
  • Isaac Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches”
  • Carl Sandburg, “Grass”
  • Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et decorum est”
  • Teresa Hooley, “At the Cinema”

 

Propaganda posters (D)

Emily Hage, “The Magazine as Strategy: Tristan Tzara’s Dada and the Seminal Role of Dada Art Journals in the Dada Movement” (D)

Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918” (D)

Camera Work (August 1912), feat. articles by Gertrude Stein, an American living in

France: https://modjourn.org/issue/bdr565920/#

291 (July 1915): https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaao191507-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------
 

Week 4 (9/13) – The Waste Land

Read the whole poem and the supplementary material (for sources and context) in the Norton Critical Edition:

  • Composition and Publication (67-111)
  • Eliot’s Essay and Letters (114-136)
  • Frazer, from The Golden Bough (29-34)
  • Weston, from Ritual to Romance (35-39)
  • Huxley (40)
  • Baudelaire (42)
  • Ovid (46)
  • The Buddhist Fire Sermon (54)
  • Froude (57)
  • Hesse (60)
  • Upanishads (62)

 

Week 5 (9/20) – The Waste Land in The Dial and The Criterion

Read the October 1922 Dial (New York) (D) and November 1922 Criterion (London) (D) in which The Waste Land was published simultaneously. Links TBA.

Focus on internationalism in the magazines with respect to The Waste Land. How is the poem mutually illuminating with the other material appearing in these issues? What light do they shed on the idea of a transatlantic modernism?

 

Week 6 (9/27) – Exiles in Europe: The Sun Also Rises

Selection from A Moveable Feast (1964) (D)

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

 

Week 7 (10/4) – International Collaboration & Conflict On the Page: transition, The Enemy, Close-Up

Charles Moffat & Suzanne MacNevin, “The Origins of Surrealism”: http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/surrealism/Origins-of-Surrealism.html

Charles Cramer and Kim Grant, “Surrealism and Psychoanalysis”: https://smarthistory.org/surrealism-and-psychoanalysis/

André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) (D)

Sigmund Freud, selection from On the Interpretation of Dreams (D); “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (D)

Issues of three periodicals (D). Cross-examine them over the 1930s debates on nationalism (fascism) and internationalism. What roles do Surrealism and cinema play here?

  • Transition no. 2 (May 1927)
  • The Enemy no. 3 (1929)
  • Close Up (May 1928)
    • Bryher, “What shall you do in the war?” from Close Up, June 1933 (D)

 

Week 8 (10/11) – Inter-War Modernist Travel Writing

Selections from Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933) (D)

Selections from Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) (D)

 

Week 9 (10/18) – Three Guineas

Read Preface, Introduction, Three Guineas, and the Appendix featuring material from Virginia Woolf’s scrap books.

 

Week 10 (10/25) – Three Guineas in The Atlantic Monthly

Maggie Humm, selection from Modernist Women and Visual Cultures (D)

Read the issues of Atlantic Monthly featuring Three Guineas and its photographs – to be

provided (D)

 

Week 11 (11/1) – Claude McKay and Langston Hughes

Sieglinde Lemke, Introduction and Chapter 1 from Primitivist Modernism: Black Cultlure and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (D)

Claude McKay –  “If We Must Die,” "America," "Subway Wind," "To One Coming North" (D)

Langston Hughes –  “Boogie: 1 a.m.,” “Dream Boogie,” “Mother to Son,” “I, Too,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Lincoln Theatre,” “Let America be America Again” (D)

 

Week 12 (11/8) – Nightwood

Djuna Barnes: Read Eliot’s introduction and Nightwood (1936).

 

Week 13 (11/15) – Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott

Jean Rhys, selections from The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927) (D)

Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa” (1962) and “Volcano” (1976) (D)

 

Week 14 – THANKSGIVING BREAK

 

Week 15 (11/29) – In A Free State

Selections from V.S. Naipaul’s In A Free State (1971) (D) as a coda on modernism, internationalism, and the fall of Empire during the 20th Century.