Fall 2003
Gary Lee Stonum
368-3342, gary.stonum@cwru.edu
syllabus revision as of
Office hours: Mon 1-2 and Tues 2-3
ENGL 380, Senior Seminar
Anglo-American Modernism
Course Overview
ENGL 380, which is required of senior English majors and limited to them, is the capstone course for the major. As such it always includes at least three assignments: a research paper in which students ideally both make use of and advance upon what they have learned throughout their time at Case, a short reflection on their experience as English majors, and the assembly of a portfolio that includes the research paper, the reflection, one graded paper from ENGL 200 (which should already be in a file in the department office), and at least one graded paper from any 300-level English course. (The portfolio is used by the department for assessment, not of you but of the department’s programs. Such assessment is required for the university’s accreditation.)
Here you will also be asked to complete two other tasks: generating discussion questions/topics for a class early in the semester and preparing a brief report later in the semester on a critical study of modernism.
This particular seminar concerns what is often called High Modernism, the preeminent Anglo-American literary phenomenon from about 1905 to 1940 and also at this time a central feature in European culture generally. During these years various (make that highly various) poets and novelists, sometimes allied in cliques and cabals and sometimes not, effected important changes in artistic practice and belief. Many of the ideas and some of the styles championed at the time remain prominent to this day, although they are now less likely to seem innovative than obvious or established. Indeed, many of the norms of academic literary studies today derive from the modernists, so there is at least the potential for a happy synergy between the materials we study in the course and your reflections on the major.
The course divides into two aspects, which may or may not converge. On the one hand, we will together be examining a number of the classic texts of Anglo-American modernism. For most of you this should involve some re-reading of poems or novels you have encountered elsewhere, perhaps more than once. As context for these works you will also look at a few important documents and manifestoes from the period, read various essays about its culture, and hear as much or more than you can bear of the professor’s pet ideas. This part of the course culminates in what is meant to be an unhurried reading of the period’s most unanimously acknowledged masterpiece, Joyce’s Ulysses. Perhaps perversely, we will be reading it for fun: there will be no exams and or other forms of graded educational labor to test your reading.
On the other hand and most intensively during the time we read Ulysses, each of you will be working on the course’s primary graded output, a research paper of 12-15 pages on some topic related to the course. Except for the proviso that this is to be a research paper, requiring thorough familiarity with the scholarly literature on the topic you choose, the scope and content is up to you. The ideal is that you will find a topic that draws upon or even culminates the work you have previously been doing at the university. That could be something that grows directly out of the readings for the course, but you are allowed, even encouraged to range beyond this material. For example, someone who has been working largely in film studies might want to study something in the movies of the period or in later movies that draw upon a modernist esthetic. There is also a “default” topic linked to the early class session that will take place in the library. This would be to report on the significance and the aims of one of the era’s little magazines.
A word on pace and load: There is a fair bit of required reading in this course, especially in the first half of the semester. During one three-week stretch you will be asked to read a novel per week.
Required Texts
David Bradshaw,
ed., A Concise Companion to Modernism. Blackwell, 2003 [includes David
Bradshaw: Introduction, Jeremy MacClancy:
Anthropology: ‘The latest form of evening entertainment,’ April McMahon:
Language: ‘History is a nightmare from
which I am trying to awake,’ Tim Armstrong:
Technology: ‘Multiplied man,’ Peter D. McDonald: Modernist publishing: ‘Nomads and mapmakers,’ and Todd Avery and
Patrick Brantlinger:
Michael Levenson, ed. The
Jahan Ramazini et al. eds., Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. vol 1, 3rd edition. W.W. Norton. [includes poems by William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and T.S. Eliot; prose by T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein]. (isbn: 0393977919)
Poets not included on syllabus but highly recommended as paper topics: William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, and Langston Hughes
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying. Vintage (067973225x)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Harvest Books (0156907399)
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Bedford/St. Martin’s isbn: 0312061706)
James Joyce, Ulysses. Vintage (isbn: 0679722769)
Jean Toomer, Cane. Liveright (isbn: 0871401517)
E. M. Forster, Passage
to
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August 27 |
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introduction |
Eliot: Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Bradshaw’s and Levenson’s introductions; Avery & Brantlinger on reading |
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September 3 |
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The men of 1914 |
Eliot: The Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, especially chapters 1, 2 and 4 |
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September 10 |
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Eliot:
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” |
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September 17 |
[meet in Special Collections room of KSL] |
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Little magazines and big ambitions |
McDonald on publishing Pound: “How to Read” Rainey on cultural economy Recommended: Macleod on visual arts and Wood on film |
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September 24 |
Discussion questions I |
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Encountering the other; sensing an ending |
Forster: Passage to Yeats: The Second Coming Stevens: Sunday Morning Recommended: Eliot: Gerontion and MacClancy on anthropology |
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October 1 |
Discussion questions II |
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New narrative forms I |
Faulkner: As I Lay Dying |
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October 8 |
Discussion questions III |
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New narrative forms II |
Woolf: To the Lighthouse |
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October 15 |
[Discussion questions IV] |
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romantic vs classic |
Hulme: Romanticism and Classicism Pound: A Retrospect, and Stevens, from Two or Three Ideas (xerox) Pound: Portrait d’un Femme, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley H.D. Oread, The Pool, Sea Rose Garden, Sea Violet, Helen, Fragment Sixty-Eight; Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Anecdote of a jar, The Snow Man, Bantams in Pine Woods, The Idea of Order at key West, Of Modern Poetry, from Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, The Motive for Metaphor Recommended: Stevens: Aphorisms |
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October 22 |
Reports I |
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outsiders |
Toomer: Cane, Stein: poems and Transatlantic Interview in Norton, Composition as explanation [xerox] Recommended: Blair on politics of culture; DeKoven on gender; Hughes: The Negro Artist and the |
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October 29 |
Reports II |
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Yeats’s career |
Yeats: When You Are Old, Song of the Wandering Aengus, A Coat, Easter 1916, Second Coming, Prayer for My Daughter, Sailing to Byzantium, Among School Children, Byzantium, Long-Legged Fly,The Circus Animals’ Desertion |
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November 5 |
Reports III |
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Frost |
Frost: Mending Wall, After Apple Picking, The Oven Bird, Birches, For Once, Then, Something; Acquainted with the Night, Two Tramps in Mud Time, Desert Places, Design, The Silken Tent, Never Again Would Bird’s Song Be the Same, The Need of Being Versed in Country Things |
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November 12 |
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Joyce: Ulysses, chapters 1-3 Recomended: McMahon on language |
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November 19 |
Proposal/bibliography due |
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Joyce: Ulysses, chapters 4-10 Recommended: Armstrong on technology |
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November 23/26 |
(possible sunday symposium in the country) |
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Joyce: Ulysses, chapters 11-15 |
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December 3 |
Draft of final paper due |
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Joyce: Ulysses, chapters 16-18 |
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December 8, 9 |
Paper workshops: TBA |
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December 12 |
Final paper (2 copies) and portfolio due |
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Assignments and grading
1. Discussion questions: Prepare two questions on (some part of) the
readings for a class that can guide our discussion for the day. Post them to the course’s blackboard.com site
(or email to all of us) by
2. Reports (3-5 pages): Summarize the main claims and arguments of one of the following documents. You need not evaluate the claims or opine about them, but you may do so. If possible, post the report to our blackboard.com site the night before the class. Otherwise, be ready to give an oral report. [If two people are working on the same text, feel free to collaborate or to divide up the task.] (15%)
Hugh
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernism
Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of
Modernism
Ann Douglas, Terrible
Honesty: Mongrel
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernity, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture:
Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century
Mark Morrison, The Public Face Of Modernism : Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920
3. Proposal/bibliography: In a minimum of a single sentence and a maximum of a paragraph, describe the research paper you propose to write, identifying the primary texts with which you will work and the question you mean to address. Include a bibliography of at least five works (articles or books or book chapters, no websites!) relevant to your topic. (0%, pass/fail; no research papers accepted until proposal is OK’d).
4. Participation and preparedness: Wholly subjective, arbitrary and capable of being influenced by bribery, this is the grade for contributing to the course’s educational goals. Class participation counts in your favor, as do contributions to the roundtable. This can be either or both; you don’t have to be a voluble personality or a chat room cynosure. Evidence of not keeping up with the reading will have massive, immediate negative effects. (10%).
5. Portfolio, including reflection. (0%, pass/fail: which means that your reflections on our seminar or previous course work with me or candid comments about my brilliance, sartorial stylishness, and general allround wonderfulness do not affect your grade. It also means you cannot finish the course without turning in a portfolio)
6. Research paper (12-15 pages: (70%). Described above.
Blackboard.com
We will make considerable use of our space on Case’s blackboard site. There is no formal requirement about postings, but my hope is that our discussions will occur on line as well as viva voce. The discussion section of the software is especially useful to keep going conversations about books or topics we have otherwise passed by in the syllabus, topics that hadn’t been anticipated by the course structure, or remarks by and responses to persons who lack Jimmy Glick’s predilection for jumping into the fray and eliminating all rival voices. Please check the site before coming to class.
Suggested research topics
1. Analyze what is (or has been thought to be) innovative and/or modernist about one of the novels read for the course.
2. Making use of a handful of key poems by each, compare how any two poets read for the course define modern poetry.
3. Select and analyze four representative issues of one of the following literary magazines, from the years specified, in order to show the magazine’s aims and/or significance. Of the periodicals available in print or microfilm at KSL you may select The Dial from 1920-24 or from 1925-29, the New Criterion (sometimes appearing under slightly different names) from 1922-1926, Hound and Horn from 1927-1931, Broom from 1921-1924, The Little Review from 1916-1920. Or of those available at other local libraries, The Egoist (formerly The New Freewoman) from 1915-1919, Others from 1915-1919, and transition from 1927-1931.