LIT 4714 Spring 2023 Jaffe

"On or about December 1910 human character changed," wrote Virginia Woolf. Our emphasis in this course will be the various literary forms, innovations, and interdisciplinary experiments of transnational modernism—in other words, some of the literary developments Woolf had in mind when she made her famous assertion. While we will spend the bulk of the term reading a number of modernist giants, we will also have a look at essential movements and avant-gardes (such as the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, the Frankfurt School, the Harlem Renaissance and emergent global networks of modernism), some key modernist precursors, and the recovery and reassessment of lesser known or forgotten works, innovative rebels and avant-gardists.