Modernism and the Meaning of Life

Undergraduate / Graduate

In the early part of the 20th Century, novelists from all over Europe converged on the thought that humanity was in some kind of crisis: culture had broken. In this class, we will read classics of modernist literature by James Joyce, Robert Musil, Fernando Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Broch, Wallace Stevens, alongside philosophical and critical texts by William James, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Robert Pippin and others. Our goal will be to try to understand what has changed for us: what is the new problem of the meaning of life?