3.0

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Does literature represent reality or create it? Is language just a tool we use to communicate, or is it shaped by our culture, or indeed, is our culture—and even our own experiences—shaped by our language? Modernist writers at the turn of the 20th century grappled with these questions, concerned that literature and in fact language itself was ill-equipped to face the changes occurring at the beginning of a new era of modernity. From symbolist and sound poetry to innovations in stream of consciousness narration and non-syntactic fragmentation, the literature of the time reflected a receding faith in the ability for ordinary spoken language to communicate feeling, meaning, and the authentic self. The task of modernism in turn became the reinvention of a new literary language that could either capture this condition of crisis or seek to overcome it. This course will investigate the various responses and solutions to the crisis of language in Anglo-American and European modernist fiction. Authors to be studied: Virginia Woolf, Andrei Bely, Franz Kafka, Jean Toomer, Filippo Marinetti, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Olesha, et al. All readings will be in English.