230227 Modernism (S) (WiSe 2004/2005)

'On or about December 1910 human nature changed'. The sense of rupture that Virginia Woolf's famous - and contestable - quotation encapsulates was equally famously referred to as 'choque' by Walter Benjamin. In this seminar we will explore how this 'shock' of a rapid modernisation left its mark on the literature of the time. We will look at key texts by three major authors, which offer very different angles. As an introduction to the period and its turn away from tradition we follow the literary evolvement of W. B. Yeats's poetry by reading selected poems; we are confronted with the linguistic and psychological effects of the First World War and the modernist sense of dislocation in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse raises questions of psychology, consciousness, and the nature and the role of art. Since Woolf's comment was made à propos an exhibition of paintings and since her novel engages centrally with painting, the visual arts will accompany us in our explorations. The topic of this seminar was requested by students in my "Concepts of Literature" seminar during the last winter semester and we will at least marginally maintain the theoretical / philosophical angle on literature during the period of modernism by also considering a small selection of theoretical texts of the period in the course of the seminar.

Texts

• A reader containing selected poems by W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land will by available for you to copy in the library by the beginning of the semester.
• Virginia Woolf, ''To the Lighthouse,''1927

Required Preparatory Reading
Please read Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds.), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, Harmondsworth: 1991.