Syllabus
WEEK-TO-WEEK SYLLABUS:
Week 1
Introduction to modernism
Reading: Virginia Woolf – essays “Modern Fiction,” “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” “Character in Fiction”
Week 2
Virginia Woolf’s short fiction
Reading: Virginia Woolf – short stories “Kew Gardens,” “The Mark on the Wall,” “Solid Objects,” “The Death of the Moth”
Week 3
Virginia Woolf’s elegy
Reading: Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Week 4
Virginia Woolf’s feminism
Reading: Virginia Woolf - A Room of One’s Own, “Professions for Women”
Week 5
Virginia Woolf and the limits of the novel
Reading: Virginia Woolf - The Waves
Week 6
Jean Rhys and women living on the margin of society
Reading: Jean Rhys - Good Morning, Midnight
Week 7
Katherine Mansfield’s short fiction
Reading: Katherine Mansfield - “Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day,” “Something Childish but Very Natural,” “Psychology,” “The Fly”
Week 8
Djuna Barnes’s short fiction
Reading: Djuna Barnes - “Mother,” “A Night Among the Horses,” “Aller et Retour,” “Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady,” “The Passion”
Week 9
Gertrude Stein’s “non-representational” poetry
Reading: Gertrude Stein - Tender Buttons, “Composition as Explanation”
Week 10
Poems of Mina Loy and Nancy Cunard - feminism and racial justice
Reading: Mina Loy - poems “The Effectual Marriage,” “Gertrude Stein,” “Joyce’s Ulysses,” “Human Cylinders”, essays “Aphorisms on Futurism” and “Modern Poetry”
Nancy Cunard - poems “Wheels,” “The Carnival of Peace,” “Voyages North,” pamphlet “Black Man and White Ladyship,” essay “Harlem Reviewed”
Week 11
Zelda Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical fiction
Reading: Zelda Fitzgerald – novel Save Me the Waltz
Week 12
Flannery O’Connor – Southern Gothic and American late modernism
Reading: Flannery O’Connor – short stories “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Good Country People,” “The River”