College Bulletin 2022-2023 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
College Bulletin 2022-2023 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENGL 078P. Make it New: Modernism and International Experimentation


Ezra Pound’s appeal to his contemporaries to “make it new” became the most famous dictum of literary modernism. While the phrase emphasized newness, it was, in fact, appropriated from a Chinese source. How might our understanding of literary modernism change when viewed in an international context? And how might an increasingly global world have contributed to the types of literary experimentation taking place across the globe in the first half of the 20th century? This course examines the explosion of literary and aesthetic experimentation that took place during the modernist period (ca. 1890-1945), with a particular focus on the ways in which formal invention was facilitated by global exploration. While we will primarily read American and British authors, this course will engage with how their writings explored, challenged, or were directly influenced by global texts, contexts, and encounters. Students will explore such topics as Zurich and Berlin Dadaism, French Cubism and Surrealism, Italian and Russian Futurism; and read such authors as T.S. Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, and Louis Zukofsky. This course is open to first year students.
20th/21st c.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Catalog chapter: English Literature  
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature


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