ENG 5933 Jaffe Spring 2021

This course offers a graduate seminar on modernist literature and culture in the context of the radically altered media background of modernity. What is or was modernism? What is the relation between modernism, the avant-garde, postmodernism, and the contemporary? What does media history have to do with modernist aesthetics? What does literary modernism have to do with literary history? What’s new 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 remain 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.