ENGL 213

Fall 2023 All Classes

All Classes

Modernist Literature and Culture

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Credit: 3 hours.

Study of literature, philosophy, visual and performing arts, social criticism, and popular sciences of the Anglo-American modernist period (approximately 1900-1950), with attention to broad cultural issues.

Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Cultural Studies - Western

Humanities – Lit & Arts

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ENGL 213 class schedule data for fall 2023
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	46720	Lecture-Discussion	M	9:30AM -10:45AM	TR	259 English Building	Newcomb, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/21/23-12/06/23 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course. Section Info: FA23 ENGL 213 Modernist Lit and Culture: The twentieth century began in a moment of unprecedented social, economic and technological change. Artists in all genres – literary, visual, and musical - responded with fundamental changes in their attitude toward mainstream culture, and innovations in the forms they used that were often playful but always intense. This remarkable period of experimentation and exploration in all the arts, which can be dated roughly between 1900 and 1940, we call modernism. We’ll examine modernism through the image and setting of “the city” as the laboratory for the 20th-century world. By 1900 most countries in the industrialized world had experienced a fundamental shift, from primarily rural to primarily urban. But not all urban spaces are the same; we’ll trace how competing models of urban space shaped the literature and culture of the early 20th century, and investigate how the emergence of the industrialized city as the dominant modern space made our world what it is, for better and worse. Among the questions we’ll consider: What features make the “modern world” modern? How did such concepts as nation, race, gender, class, and mass culture shape 20th-century identities? How did life-changing technologies, and the unpredictable sociopolitical changes they brought, produce new styles of behavior, compulsion, and creation? How might the arts reveal, and conceivably change, that world? Before we’re done we’ll come to see that the passionate responses of modernist artists to their challenging world helped to define 20th-century culture and society, and offer us a lens for imagining where we might be heading a century later. Authors likely to be included are Hemingway, Eliot, Williams, Larsen, Hughes, Sandburg, Millay, McKay, Cather, and Yezierska. You can expect to do three critical essays, be strongly encouraged to participate in discussion, and take a final exam.