ENGLISH 176: The Meaning of Newness: Traditions of British Modernism

Course Description

A century on, this course revisits Ezra Pound's imperative - "Make It New" - to inquire into how British modernists inherited, invigorated, and mythologized the new. Through works by Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Mansfield, Orwell, and Auden, we trace British modernism's literary ancestry, moment, and legacy. Was its self-pronounced newness a fiction or a reality, a symbolic fracture or a historical recursion? What literary pasts had to be renamed or disavowed for the new to emerge? What new regimes and orders did modernism beget? Note: Students who took ENGLISH 5NA should not enroll in this course due to significant overlap in content.