Modernism SS 22

In order to underline Modernism’s rupture with the past – aesthetically, socially, politically and culturally – Virginia Woolf wrote in “Character in Fiction” (1924) that the writers of her time must put aside the tools used by writers in the past, because “on or about December, 1910, human character changed”. In the same text, quoted far less frequently however, Woolf also acknowledges that “change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.” Modernism presents a bewildering plurality of material with specific literary and aesthetic practices developing over the course of roughly thirty years, so much so that some have preferred to speak of modernisms in the plural. Broad themes, however, about the nature of selfhood and consciousness, the autonomy of language, the role of art and of the artist, the nature of the industrial world, and the alienation of gendered existence form a set of concerns which manifest themselves across a range of works and authors. This seminar will discuss selected texts from the modernist period and examine the characteristics and contexts of the period itself. The seminar will offer an introduction not only to the texts but also discuss various modernist movements and their related contexts.