ENGL 363-01, Artists Astray: British and Irish Modernism, Spring 2012

Abstract

An advanced study of modernist thought and culture, this course will focus on the representation of artistic and intellectual work in England and Ireland in the first four decades of the twentieth century. We will read selections from some of the most innovative and challenging works of the canonical “high” modernists, examining how these writers’ fascination with perception, memory, and relation emerged from wild and raucous debates about the meaning of modernity and art across the pages of newspapers, journals, reviews, and little magazines. First published in a magazine popular across the British Empire for its horror stories, Conrad’s Lord Jim presents a disorienting vision of failed agency and miscommunication. Yeats’s poems, prose, and plays borrowed and invented Irelands that demanded new forms of publication like The Samhain or the Cuala Press. The Dublin of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man emerged from Austro-Hungarian enemy territory to appear in London in the pages of The Egoist. The Missouri-born Eliot’s “The Waste Land” appeared in London’s The Criterion and Woolf’s Hogarth Press, while the shell-shock depicted in Woolf’s own Mrs. Dalloway was one of the many consequences of the Easter Rising that had been debated in the Irish Times. Likewise, the aesthetics of maddened solipsism in Beckett’s Murphy had first appeared the Paris journal transition and the Dublin Magazine. In this course, we will investigate how these artists’ border-crossings and translations shaped their work—and ask what new exchanges they make possible.