ENGL8600: Sem Modern Lit (65112)

Martini Paula, Rodrigo

M 9:10 AM

Park Hall 0061

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ENGL 8600 – Seminar in Modern Literature

Parasitic Modernisms
     
This seminar explores how modernism uses and abuses the symbiotic, and mostly parasitic, relationship between literature and the various discourses about the human (or, more specifically, about “Man”) to critique and creatively reconstruct human subjectivity at the turn of the twentieth century. Considering the burgeoning media ecology of modernism as a key modulator between literature and other disciplines, this course engages with theories and assumptions about humanity present in psychology, philosophy, biology, physics, mathematics, media and technology, and several other disciplines. 
  
Our primary material may include:

• Fiction, poetry, and drama by HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Treadwell, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Toomer, and others; 
• a cornucopia of avant-garde pieces (from Dada collages to Surrealist films); 
• and excerpts of scientific, philosophical, and theoretical debates at the turn of the century. 

Contemporary criticism in the fields of modernism, animal studies, and media thinking will help orient us. 
   
Ultimately, however, modernist aesthetics will chart the course of our inquiry. The title “Parasitic Modernisms" invites us to wonder, how does literature stand in relation to other forms of knowledge? How can the literary text appropriate disciplinary knowledge and still remain its own master-discourse? 

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