Imagining Modernity: Literature and Society Since Romanticism

Modernity can be variously conceived (we now speak of Shakespeare’s period as the “early modern”); but for the purposes of this course, we will conceive of it beginning with Romanticism—when crucial concepts such as “literature” and “culture” took on roughly the meanings they still have for us today. We will study works that examine the questions of literary form, style, and genre and the social and political life from which these works emerge. It is hoped that the approach taken in this course will make it possible to explore relationships between literary forms of the period that are usually studied separately; for example, between lyric poetry and the novel, between 19th-century realistic fiction and modernist experimental fiction, and between imaginative or “creative” writing and theoretical and critical texts. Writers to be read include Blake, Emily Bronte, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Melville, Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, Conrad, Yeats, Mann, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Faulkner, Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morriison.