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The emergence of modernism – or rather a large variety of modernisms – in American arts and letters at the beginning of the twentieth century confronts us with various attempts to 'break with the past' and to anticipate a new age. Whereas some writers, such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot, left the United States for a Europe that offered many possibilities of a critical engagement with a rich cultural heritage, others, such as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, stayed in America, celebrating as well as mourning the unencumbered 'newness' of American culture. This course will introduce you to different kinds of internationalism (James vs. Eliot), regionalism (Frost and Faulkner), feminist and ethnic criticism (Stein, H.D., U.S. American and Caribbean writers of the Harlem Renaissance), and linguistic experiment (Stein, Pound). It will also seek to explain why “modernism” is an important concept in U.S. American literature, but does not work particularly well for the critical analysis of contemporaneous Canadian and Caribbean literature. Please purchase and read William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! before the beginning of the term. A reader with additional material will be made available at the copy shop in Reckhammerweg after the first week of the term. |
