Department of English

This course will examine the two major 20th-century cultural movements of modernism and post-modernism. Modernist writers, painters, dancers, and film-makers sought to re-invent cultural expression through experimentation with form, and with the creation of meaning through art. Post-modernists have embraced the notion of chance as a primary element in artistic production, pairing it with the modernist technique of fragmentation and pastiche, as a mode for challenging the production of literary meaning altogether. We will explore modernist works of poetry, drama, and fiction by Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, and postmodernist works by Tom Stoppard, Jeanette Winterson, Salman Rushdie, and Eavan Boland. Requirements: two short papers, and one longer comparative essay.