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”