Università Roma Tre

In the teaching of English literature, the term 'English (High) Modernism' has long been used to identify, among the poems and novels written in the United Kingdom from the early twentieth century to the post-war period, a body of works so unique that it required a new academic discipline - English Studies - to make them understandable to the English public.
It is interesting to note that, while the difficult and impersonal poetry of the 'modernists' was presented as a rebellion against the kind of poetry written over the past three centuries, the modernist novel was hailed instead as the culmination of an evolution that led the crude creations of a Daniel Defoe to become finally an art form.
Perhaps not enough thought has been given to the fact that many of the modernist authors - and certainly the major ones - were foreigners; some lived in London as expatriates, but they were a minority: others resided in the English countryside, others in Europe.
The course will be an opportunity for a reflection on the meaning of "modernism", and on how to conceptualize that period through the notion of "modernisms". We will study three novels by modernists - only one of which is 'English' - and a selection of poetic works, which we will address by contrasting the American priests of "modernist" poetry and other poets. It will be interesting to hear what the students think about these poems.

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams vs. W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, D. H. Lawrence e Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost