3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Since Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos declaimed that he had “completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all,” modernist writers at the beginning of the 20th century grappled with the fear that language as such could no longer serve as an adequate medium of representing reality. 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 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, European, and Russian modernist fiction. Authors to be studied: Virginia Woolf, Andrei Bely, Franz Kafka, Jean Toomer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Samuel Beckett, et al. All readings will be in English.