LIT 4714 – Spring 2027 – Jaffe

"On or about December 1910 human character changed," wrote Virginia Woolf. This course focuses on the literary forms, innovations, and interdisciplinary experiments of transnational modernism--the developments Woolf had in mind when she made her famous claim. Much of our work will involve interrogating the slipperiness of the term "Modernism": how well does it define, characterize, and interpret the complex, unorthodox, and often cosmopolitan writing, art, and culture we will examine? How do modernist authors and artists engage new ideas from modern philosophy, psychology, and the non-literary arts; transformations in technology and social institutions; migration and popular culture; shifting understandings of politics and society, including gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and class; and the new forms of identity, subjectivity, and agency that emerge from these changes? While we will spend most of the term reading modernist giants, we will also consider essential movements and avant-gardes (the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, the Frankfurt School, the Harlem Renaissance, and emergent global networks of modernism), key modernist precursors, and the recovery and reassessment of lesser-known or forgotten works and innovators.