Modernist Studies

This area conventionally takes as its referent the experiments in style and form characteristic of various modernist movements in the arts from around 1890 to 1939. However, in keeping with recent critical re-formulations of modernism, texts read in these courses cross genres and national boundaries, and many of them stretch conventional designations of the modernist period. For example, we offer courses that concentrate on individual writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, but here and elsewhere we question the formation of a modernist literary canon. Faculty who teach these courses specialize in the following: constructions of modernism; modernism-modernity; modernism-postmodernism; histories and theories of the avant-garde; transcultural modernism (crosscurrents between the colonies and Britain); Caribbean modernism; the Harlem Renaissance, experimental poetics; modernist satire; fin-de-siecle "decadence"; Bloomsbury; Irish studies; queer Modernism (Anglo-American and French); interdisciplinary currents (including music, visual art, and dance); prose-fiction (including satire and literary "confession");19th-century survivals (Romantic and Victorian ideologies within 20th-century discourse); and critical theory.

Faculty

Examples of courses offered by faculty in this area;

Undergraduate:

• Anglo-American Modernism
• Introduction to the Novel: from Modernism to Postmodernism
• Virginia and Leonard Woolf
• Selected Writings of Virginia Woolf
• Selected Modern Authors
  (these vary and include Joyce, Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and others)
• The Harlem Renaissance, Art Forms of Queer Identity
• History and Theory of the Avant-Garde
• Literature and the First World War
• Poetic Communities
• the Encyclopedic Poem
• Transcultural Modernism

Graduate:

• British Literature 1914-1945
• Queer Theory
• Confessional Narrative in Post-Structural Perspective
• Constructions of Modernism
• Theories of the Avant-Garde
• England between the Wars
• Transcultural Modernism
• Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
• Innovative Poetics
• Finnegans Wake and Phenomenology
• Anglo-American Modernism