ENGL 213 - Modernism and the Manifesto

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
Modernists were obsessed with justifying their difference from the generation that came before. They argued that they were the representatives of a new life of the mind, soul, and body; and they wrote furious documents supporting that claim. In this course we read those documents and examine the artworks that the same writers produced, asking ourselves how these novels and poems live up to the claims made in the manifestos. We will interrogate the difference between artistic and essayistic thought, asking why we think about art in terms of movements, why we must claim that our work is important, and why we feel a need to distinguish ourselves from the generation that came before. Writers may include Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Ezra Pound.