ENG 5079 Fall 2019 Jaffe

This course explores modern and contemporary literature in the context of the profoundly altered science, tech, media and ecological enviorments of modernity. Is what we call “modernism” a deliberate aesthetic response to scientific and technological changes or a reflex or a symptom. To borrow from the “semi-fictitious” International Necronautical Society: how and why does modern matter matter in literary and cultural ways? We’ll read theory and literature, including examples of "speculative realism,” a new term of art for the theoretical turn to materialism contra the linguistic turn. We’ll look at what’s (still) new in modernist studies? It sounds redundant. Or, insecure. Make it new, again? This class will pursue the idea that new modernist studies is less about new interpretations of old texts - less even, new texts to interpret - and more about a second modernism: new scholarly attitude, new interpretive horizons, new archives and new contexts. There remains two pressing needs for new modernist studies that we will pursue in this course: first, to theorize the conditions of possibility for this kind of work, and, second, to look back to the modern writers and thinkers who showed us - and can still show us - how.