AP/EN 4170 6.0A Couse Director: Delivery Format: Fall/Winter 2014-2015 Modernism/Postmodernism Bruce Powe bpowe@yorku.ca Seminar Time: T 4:00-7:00 Description: Category: Area: Period: Requirements: Reading List: Open To:
English 4170 6.0: Modernism/Postmodernism: The Shock of Now 2014-2015 Professor B.W. Powe Course Description
In 1910 the whole world changed. This statement has been attributed to Virginia Woolf about the dawning of Modernism. The word modern comes from the Latin word modo, which means now. The early twentieth century saw revolutions in art, literature, music, physics, psychology, cinema, technology, and politics. What were these conditions? How did writers and artists make the new? Innovation, experimentation, multiple perspectives, the discovery of the unconscious, relativity, the uncertainty principle, the idea of the avante-garde, new art movements like Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, new technologies like radio, cinema (projected light), the electrification of cities: these are some of the revolutions that galvanized the culture of early Modernism. Modernist writers were on the forefront of these movements, expressing their breakthroughs and breakdowns. What elements and qualities, concerns and techniques, can we discern in certain exemplary Modernists, who engaged and created and received and transmitted the new consciousness of the 20 th -century? What did it mean to follow Rimbaud s maxim One must be absolutely modern? Modernism metamorphosed into Postmodernism. That word carries profound ambiguities: Post means after ; and it implies that movements came after now Post-Modernism often appears to be a late 20 th century early 21 st century movement that is the thrall and shadow of what came before; yet it has distinct aesthetic, poetic, critical, theoretical, and cultural streams. Post-Modernism saw the advent of TV and the PC (emanation light), and the displacement of the
printed word from cultural supremacy. The global village (a.k.a. the global theatre) and globalization exist side by side, or within each other: transnational influence is the deep aspect of our time and place. The vision of Post-Modernist conditions are powerfully etched in certain select writers, performers and theoreticians; the focus is often on communication, technology, forms of consciousness that come about in an age illuminated and propelled by radical change, the speeding up of the present. We will explore this evolutionary jump from Modernism to Post-Modernism and beyond, into the appearances and strains of sensibility and awareness that are dawning in our new century. This course asks the student to study texts that are in part canonic and in part in the flux of the new. It asks students to think in ways that will require them to perceive their electrified environment where the media have become the massage, new technologies appear every day, identity is questioned, and the boundaries of forms are shifting quickly. Interdisciplinarity is of the essence to comprehend the Modernism/Postmodernism jump. In the electronic age we are living entirely by music, Marshall McLuhan said. We are still experiencing the shock of the new that began a century ago; but how is this experience also expressed in the voices, narrative, theories and images of representative contemporaries?
Course Requirements Fall term essay (7 pages), 20%; fall in-class exam, 20%; winter term essay (10 pages), 25%; final exam, 25%; class engagement and short written responses to general discussions (10%). Course Reading List (This is the order in which these texts will be read.) 1-58423-342-7 LEWIS / BLAST 1 (GINKO PR) 978-0-375-75934-5 ELIOT / WASTE LAND & OTHER WRITINGS (INTRO: KARR) 978-0-8112-0958-8 WILLIAMS / WILLIAMS SELECTED POEMS 978-0-14-004259-7 KEROUAC / ON THE ROAD 0-375-70052-8 DURAS / LOVER (WITH NEW INTRO) 978-0-09-946689-5 BALLARD J / CRASH 09/05 978-0-8195-6028-5 CAGE / SILENCE 978-0-679-72875-7 MCCARTHY / BLOOD MERIDIAN 978-0-394-28014-1 WINTERSON / WRITTEN ON THE BODY 978-1-85984-241-6 BAUDRILLARD / PAROXYSM 978-0-676-97274-0 CARSON / PLAINWATER ESSAYS & POETRY 0-312-42033-1 BALLARD / CRASH 978-0-19-953662-7 WOOLF / WAVES 978-1-58423-070-0 MCLUHAN / MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE 978-0-14-319054-7 DELILLO, DON / LIBRA 0-8112-0544-4 HD / HELEN IN EGYPT 0-85728-488-6 JOYCE / JOYCE SELECTED WORKS Cinema: Un Chien Andalou, by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, Bugs Bunny Duck Amuck, Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen, The Artist. Music: by Stravinsky, The Who, Patty Smith.