Shaping of Modern Literature: Modernity After the Millenium

3 units

Over the past two decades, modernity (understood roughly as the era inaugurated by the second half of the eighteenth century, with Enlightenment reformation leading to Romantic revolution) has been characterized in several ways, depending on whether or not it is seen as having finally come to an end in the second half of the twentieth century. Against Francois Lyotard's 1984 account of a distinctly "postmodern condition," Albrecht Wellmer argues for "the persistence of modernity," whereas Bruno Latour proposes that "we have neer been modern." In conjunction with the book-length works in which these theorists forcefully flesh out their contrary positions, we will read several influential literary texts (fiction and/or poetry) from the early and mid-twentieth century as well as a handful of important texts published in the past decade.