The Modernist Novel in the 1920s

Undergraduate

Many of the classics of modernist fiction were published between 1920 and 1930. These novels did not come into the world as “modernist”; that term was later conferred on narrative experiments often considered bizarre at the time. As writers, the “modernists” did not conform to pre-existing social conceptions of “the writer” nor work with established systems of narrative genres; rather, they tried to remake the novel as form and bend it to new purposes. This course invites students to consider diverse morphologies of the Anglophone modernist novel in this decade and to reflect on its consequences for later developments in twentieth-century fiction. The seminar encourages careful analyses of individual texts but engages also with literary markets, patronage systems, changing world literary systems, the rise of cinema and mass and consumer cultures, and later Cold War constructions of the ideology of modernism. WR , HU MW 11:35am-12:50pm