INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Modernisms. We will be spending this semester looking at "Modernism" -- and 'modernisms' -- and what that means as a way of depicting, writing about, and writing within the modern world and in response to it.

Content note: several of the novels, short stories, and art on this paper include depictions of violence, sexual assault, and other potentially distressing material. Each text on this course will have a content note on Moodle advising you of potential issues. If you think that reading these texts or discussing them in class might be an issue for you, send me an email. I will be happy to discuss any concerns and work on strategies.

PAPER DESCRIPTION
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of unprecedented change to economic, cultural and political structures in Europe and America. Marx’s theories of class struggle, Freud’s theories of the unconscious, Darwin’s theories of evolution, and Einstein’s theory of relativity all made the world a more complicated place. Women’s demands for suffrage threatened order in the home, the invention of the airplane made the world seem smaller, and the xray exposed the body under the skin.

Many writers of the time felt that the literary techniques of the nineteenth century, particularly literary realism, were no longer capable of responding to the changes in society. They engaged with this sense of transformation by rallying to Ezra Pound’s call to ‘make it new’ and experimented with new ways of telling stories, new ways of presenting characters, new ways of representing life, and new ways of changing the world.

The experience of modernity and unprecedented societal change also went hand in hand with living through the 1918 influenza pandemic, PTSD and trauma from the First World War, and anxiety about what the rapid urbanisation of daily life and increasing dependency on technology would mean for people living in the modern world. We will read texts that grapple with both the positive and negative aspects of living in a time of such rapid change and uncertainty about the future.

The course will begin by looking at texts from the traditional field of modernist fiction, centered on London, Paris, and New York, and end by examining New Zealand and Pacific responses to modernism and to their own sense of modernity.

PAPER STRUCTURE
This paper consists of two hours of lectures and a one-hour tutorial. The lectures will be recorded, but I strongly suggest that you attend the lectures in person.

Please organise your study to ensure that you attend the lectures having read each week's literary and critical texts: your ability to follow the lecture and ask any questions needed will greatly increase if you do. The short quizzes, which are due just before we start each novel, are designed to help you check your basic comprehension of the longer texts. Getting the questions right can make a really positive difference to your grade! The short writing assignments are there to ensure that you develop your writing skills and refine your reactions to the texts and critical positions.

The tutorials will be so much more enjoyable if you attend having read the material and attended the lectures.

Novels:

1. Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse (1927)
2. Nella Larsen – Passing (1929)
3. Dorothy L Sayers -- Strong Poison (1930)

Poems and Short Stories:

1. James Joyce – 'Araby' (1914)
2. T.S. Eliot – ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1920)
3. Virginia Woolf -- 'The Death of the Moth' (1927)
4. Ernest Hemingway -- 'Hills Like White Elephants' (1927)
5. Katherine Mansfield – ‘At The Bay’ (1922) and 'The Garden Party' (1922)
6. Gertrude Stein – 'Objects' (1914)
7. Katherine Anne Porter, 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' (1939)
8. William Butler Yeats - 'The Second Coming' (1921)
9. Hone Tuwhare -- 'No Ordinary Sun' (1964)
10. Jully Makini -- 'Spinning' (1981)
11. Subramani – ‘Tropical traumas’ (1988)

Critical and Theoretical essays:

1. James Wood, ‘Narrating’ in How Fiction Works, (New York: Picador, 2008), pp. 3-11, 22-25, 34-35.
2. Angela Smith, Introduction, in Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. ix-xxxii.
3. Celia Marshik, ‘Introduction: At the Mercy of their Clothes’, in At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
4. Geoffrey Rice, That Terrible Time: Eye-witness accounts of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand (Christchurch: Hawthorn Press, 2018), 7-31, 64-77.
5. Peter Simpson, 'The Group and the Caxton Press II' in Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933-1953 (Auckland: Auckland University Press), 159-194.
6. Mark A. Sanders, ‘American Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 2005), pp.129-156.
7. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Planetarity’, in Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 47-80