ENGLISH 132: Modernism and its Manifestos

Course Description

Experimental writers of the early twentieth century are infamous for their polyphonic poems and stream-of-consciousness novels, but they also published lucid, lyrical, and declamatory essays in which they explained the aims of their work. In this class, we'll pair monumental modernist classics with the manifestos that help make sense of them. Starting with the explosion of avant-garde movements in the 1910s and the protest poems of Britain's soldiers, we'll turn to major masterpieces by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Jean Rhys. Along the way, we'll read short essays by these same writers, and by others including Oscar Wilde, Mina Loy, Ford Madox Ford, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Suzanne Cesaire. As we study modernist movements like futurism, imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance, while looking at original publications like Blast, Fire!!, and The Little Review, we'll finish by compiling student writing into our own modernist magazine.