Modernism defined a significant moment in literary and intellectual history. It comprised the dual signposts of this Humanities programme, that is, Culture and its Expression, or the repudiation, re-definition and subversion of both.   A guiding principle of this course is Interdisciplinarity, that is, selected categories---literary and visual, plastic, musical and cinematic expression--- often functioned in concert with each other. Modernism in belles-lettres is fruitfully studied in the light of its "sister" activity in the fine arts. They share a common vocabulary: one can "read" a canvas, while fiction can have tone and coloration. This course accepts as axiomatic the Horatian premise, expounded in Ars Poetica: ut pictura poesis, “as is painting, so is poetry.” Literary Modernism and Modernism in the graphic arts were cognate movements which produced cognate manifestos.  These "sister arts" drew on a common sensibility and shared an interest in new articulations of space, whether on the page or the canvas.   

Our focus will be on the prodigious display of creativity in Modernist literature and on the painted canvas, with some brief, sidelong looks at sculpture, architecture, film and photography.  [We will note that the advent of photography and its absolute mimetic capability freed up the canvas to a world of interpretation beyond slavish replication.] We will study from the pantheon of Modernist writers: Yeats, Pound, Eliot Joyce, Woolf, Stein and some of the lesser gods: MacLeish and H.D., among others. While we will examine a wide variety of literary forms --- short fiction, novel, essay---we will note that poetry is a particularly fecund genre for the study of Modernist themes: existential exile, the limits of knowledge, urban estrangement, the lonely crowd, and the uses of the past, among them.  

*Attendance is mandatory. A second absence must be justified. 

I gently recommend and encourage you to keep your video on. This will help facilitate a classroom dynamic and dialogue which resembles in-class learning. Class time spans the lunch hour. So, please, go ahead and enjoy your meal. No offence taken and no need to turn off your video!  

*Please partake in classroom discussions. We value your engaged observations, comments and questions in this class. We are all here to learn and to master a new language, the language of Modernism across the arts!  Leave your inhibitions at the door. If you have medical or psychological reasons for not speaking out in class, please see me. 

Rainey, Lawrence, ed. Modernism: An Anthology. Blackwell and Wiley, 2005. Available at York Bookstore.  Will be mailed to you or be available for pickup, dependent upon provincial restrictions.  Please bring to first class. This is the only purchase for this course.  

ON-LINE RESOURCES, ESSAYS AND NOVELS:   

James, William. "The Stream of Consciousness, " psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/jimmy11.htm.  

Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4217/4217-h/4217-h.htm  

Pound, Ezra. Make It New. 

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.185999 

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91md/  

Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. 

https://monoskop.org/images/a/a2/Worringer_Wilhelm_Abstraction_and_Empathy_1997.pdf 

RESPONSES TO TEXTUAL QUESTIONS: 10% (Mid-term test submission) and 10% (Final exam submission) = 20% 

MID-TERM TEST: 20%  

FINAL EXAM: 30% 

RESEARCH PAPER: 30% (guidelines to be distributed)  

(OUTLINE: 5%; ESSAY: 25%) 

*Attendance is mandatory. 

An up to date and abridged syllabus will be distributed at first meeting and /or will be available on Moodle.

To explore the word, “Modern” and to make the distinction between Modernity as an historical category and Modernism as an aesthetic one. To understand the history and etymology of this word. Its source is older than we might have guessed:  the Scholastic reconciliation of faith and reason, the Cartesian ascendancy of the intellectual universe, among others.  Lest we think that “Modern” is a recent coinage, we can trace it back to its medieval derivation from modo, or “now ” and the 6^th century Latin prose of Cassiodorus. Modernitas (modern times), moderni (men of today) are some variations.  Another is the late 17^th century “Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns” from Swift’s The Battle of the Book. Here Swift engages, ironically, with the erosion of authority. France was the breeding ground for many versions of this querelle, or quarrel, including Stendhal’s Classic/Romantic dichotomy, “le beau ideal antique/ moderne” (Histoire de la peinture en Italie) Baudelaire views history as a succession of modernities (“Le Peintre de la vie moderne”).  Rimbaud’s diabolic cry still resonates: “Il faut etre absolument moderne” (Une saison en enfer). The above, rather cursorily, ushers us into the proto-Modernist era  which is itself preliminary to our study.

To avoid the pitfall of tendentiousness, that is, the assumption that concurrent trends and historical alignments of the subject at hand are necessarily comparable.   We must ask ourselves difficult questions about testing how rigorously we can apply artistic features across the arts. We will see, for instance,  if Stein's asyntactic sentences about buttons or vases share an aesthetic with  Duchamp's introduction of  "ready-mades" or objets trouves such as a urinal. Just as bits of dialogue "intrude" on the "space" of the poem in The Waste Land, so do pieces of the found objects or clippings from newspapers "stick" onto the canvas in a collage.  We will consider the appropriateness to our study of the Bauhaus architectural slogan, "form follows function." We will consider the ideals of synchronicity, simultaneity and polyphony across various arts. We will note the overarching pervasiveness of allusion, whether on the canvas as collage or the written word as cross-cultural reference.

To gain a literary vocabulary and critical skills toward the end of writing thoughtful research papers, executed with interpretive acumen.  To name the defining features of Modernist discourse.

To gain a corresponding critical vocabulary in the plastic arts, most especially those of great applicability to Modernist art: colour theory, light intensity, monumentality, collage, expression, abstraction etc.

To note that our study might defy chronological order, as our attention to theme or adherence to a school might warrant. To note that certain Modernist trends---Symbolism or Imagism in literature and Primitivism and Abstraction in visual arts--- pervade most of the works in question, so there exists a Cubist Primitivism as there is a Fauvist one.

To clear the ground we must identify a tradition---largely, in Britain, post Romantic or Victorian, in America, Realistic or Naturalistic, in continental Europe, ---against which Modernism defined itself.  While we will not study Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, we will acknowledge that they helped usher in a new Zeitgeist by, respectively, redefining class, the psyche and how classical gods can shape artistic categories.

To understand the spectrum of mimetic reproduction ---both poetic and plastic---of figuration and non representation.  Yet we will see that the Modernist dismissal of representationality is not absolute.

To note that some landmark innovations, for instance Chevreul's colour wheel and its concomitant chemical theory of the perception of contiguous and successive colours, influenced irretrievably, the course of the applied arts, specifically Impressionism and neo-Impressionism.

To note that "conceptual" movements such as Vorticism,  Surrealism and Futurism dismantled academies and institutions both on the canvas and on paper. Often there was a convergence of movements like psychoanalysis and Surrealism, played out in film, e.g. Dali's tableaux in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945.)

To note that broad trends in philosophy extend their influence to literature and the canvas. The same is true of social and cultural trends: The C19th creation of Ethnographic Museums inspired anthropological influences of which the African is but one variety.

To look at the Modernist artist as he typically and uneasily cultivates a protean, elusive, brash, often eccentric, persona, seeking neither the sanction of his artistic community nor the mandate of his readership. To identify each writer's signature aesthetic, style and idiolect.  To note their self-imposed exile and cross-Atlantic travels.

To become familiar with the critical reception and the canon of “recent” theories of Modernism, with special interest to us as students in the CLTR programme, including Trilling’s Arnoldian determination that the Modern element consists in “adversary culture,” or, the “disenchantment of our culture with culture itself” (“On the Teaching of Modern Literature”); Lukacs’ aforementioned Marxist critique of Modernism’s arbiters of taste and de Man’s thesis that although Modernism is a “falling away from …history,” it “also acts as the principle that gives literature duration and historical existence” (“Literary History and Literary Modernity”).  Greenberg on formalism, Schapiro on abstract art; Hutcheon's postmodern musings on the performative and parodic nature of texts and canvases in question (The Politics of Postmodernism).

Finally, given the above-mentioned difficulties in defining the movement, we will consider the possibility of Modernism as an archivist’s curatorial and reductive category. We will point the way to Postmodernism by looking at some shared vocabulary: autotelicism (reflexivity) among others  and some divergences: Modernism’s aesthetic  is formal, teleological, closural, while the poetic acts of its successor are performative, dispersive, open-ended. Russian Modernist and Suprematist El Lissitzky’s death knell for art, his essay and series of canvases,  “The Overcoming of Art," predicts the postmodern lexicon of exhaustion and obsolescence.