Università Roma Tre

We will study the most important poetic and novelistic experiments in early twentieth-century English-language modernism. We will focus in particular on the differences between British artists such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, on one hand, and the Irish and American poets as well as Joseph Conrad – an English writer but a transnational novelist.
Our purpose is not just to uncover the early signs of the dynamics that lead to a breakup of that which Antoine Compagnon has defined “le modèle de la philologie, pour laquelle l’unité langue-littérature-culture coïncide avec l’esprit d’une nation, ou d’une race”; or identify the starting point of the process which led eventually a number of non-British authors to transform what was up to that point a national literature; of even greater importance is to make students understand how much these experiments had in common with models being constructed on the Continent by those thinkers and linguists who founder literary theory, truly one of the great inventions of the 20th century.

Fiction
We will be moving back in time, in our investigation of the differences among the authors.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927). Novel
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924). Novel
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Novel
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900). Novel
D. H. Lawrence, “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (1911). Short story.

Reading List
Novels which will not be taught in depth during the course but that must be studied for the exam. Choose one among the following two:
D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

Poems
Irish Airman, Leda and the Swan, September 1913, Easter 1916, Byzantium, Sailing to Byzantium,
T. S. Eliot, “Prufrock”, The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men”
Ezra Pound, “To Whistler, American”, “In a Station of the Metro”, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

Before classes start on February 28, the instructor will send to all the students included in the mailing list the poems by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound which we will study in class.

Essays
We will study some of the main theoretical statements set forth by the authors we will study. Among these:
Joseph Conrad, “Preface” to Almayer’s Folly (1895), The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), and a selection from his letters.
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923)
Ezra Pound, “Vorticism” (1914), “Henry James and Remy de Goncourt” (in Make It New, 1935)
Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” (1919), “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923), Reviews of Conrad’s novels, references to James Joyce.

Criticism and Historical Background
These are the first of a number of critical works that form an integral part of the program. More will follow during the course.
Kenner, Hugh, “The ‘Portrait’ in Perspective, The Kenyon Review, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer, 1948), pp. 361-381 (disponibile in pdf)
Rainey, Lawrence, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, London New Haven : Yale University Press, 1998 (collocazione, LLS/ H 0681 )
Vendler, Helen, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2007 (collocazione, LLS/ 58 D 0537)