English 119 - Modernism, Shock of New

In 1852, Karl Marx observed that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”  Modernism–the aesthetic response to the experience of modernity–can be understood as a way to cast off that nightmare through the revolutionary force of the new.  In this course, arranged around thematic clusters such as The City, Alienation, Primitivism, The New Woman, War, Speed, and Consciousness, we will range widely through European and Anglo-American writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries as we look at the explosion of styles and approaches that characterize modernism in all its dazzling vivacity and disruption.

Preference given to first-year students.  Limited to 15 students.  Fall semester.  Visiting Lecturer Pritchett.