International students have to attend only Part 1 or Part 2 within the ELC Module: English Literatures and Cultures. Please agree with the seminar instructor on which part you are taking.
Cityscapes and Wastelands: Modernist poetry and prose
Part I: Virginia Woolf’s novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, T. S. Eliot’s poetry – “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” – amongst others, as well as some of their poetological texts will be central to our seminar on modernist poetry and prose. We will read these canonical texts of modernist literature with a view to their literary and poetic techniques as well as within the contexts of e.g. the modern urban experience, early 20th century European and colonial history, the relation of high and popular cultures.
Please get your own copy of the Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway for the beginning of term (e.g. Penguin Modern Classics or Oxford World’s Classics edition). The poems’ texts as well as additional material will be available on Moodle at the beginning of the semester.
PART II: Modernist Women Writers and the Arts
In the second part of the seminar the focus will shift slightly, building on the contents of PART I:
Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy share many features: they are modernist writers, they wrote experimental literary texts, and they were very interested in the other arts: Woolf, Stein, and Sitwell had close connections to painters and composers; Mina Loy was a poet and a painter. These writers were interested in how literary texts could come close to the characteristics of other art forms: How do you turn a poem into music? How can a text approach the characteristics of visual representation? What do literary and painted portraits have in common? How can a literary work textualise sensual experiences? With such questions on the relation between the arts and characteristics of modernist writing in mind, we will read short prose texts by Woolf (e.g. “The String Quartet”; “Kew Gardens”, “The Orchard“), experimental poetry by Edith Sitwell (Façade), some of Gertrude Stein’s “Portraits“ and prose texts, and some of Mina Loy’s poetry. The texts will be provided by the beginning of the semester via Moodle.
Part of the course will be a visit to one of Berlin’s museums exhibiting modernist art.
International students have to attend only Part 1 or Part 2 within the ELC Module: English Literatures and Cultures. Please agree with the seminar instructor on which part you are taking. |
