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Paris, London, Harlem: Metropolis, Modernity & American Modernist Writing
ENGL270 FA

This course will seek to understand the emergence of American Modernist writing by seeing it through three related prisms. We will focus on the importance to the modernist writers of the cities noted in the course title as simultaneously symbolic geographies, locations for literary work and bohemian life, and crucial nexuses of capital and publishing power. At the same time, we will attempt to place the imagined city of modernist writing in the context of theories of urbanization and modernizatio n. Our working hypothesis will be that, on the one hand, the modernist obsession with the "unreal city" (as Eliot put it) indicates the crucial importance of a metropolitan social life for the emergence of modernist writing and that this literature thus celebrates the sense of freedom and possibility that the cosmopolis can offer. On the other hand, this course will suggest that modernist writing's frequent distaste for the city and its corresponding nostalgic desire for authentic experience serve as cr itical explorations of the paradoxes of modernity and urbanization.

COURSE FORMAT: Lecture

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL    Grading Mode: Student Option   

Prerequisites: NONE

Last Updated on MAR-24-2000

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