English 104--The Twentieth Century

20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND THE IDEA OF THE ARTIST

Spring 2002
TTH 1:30-2:50
Office hours:  Wed 12-1:30, Bennett 308
Annenburg 109
Listserv: ENGL104-401-02A@lists.upenn.edu
Phone: 898-7822

COURSE ASSISTANTS:

Ben Singer Email: bsinger@CritPath.Org Office: Bennett Hall D9, 4th Floor Hours:  Thurs 12:00-1:00
Shanyn Fiske Email: shanyn@english.upenn.edu Office:  Bennett Hall C8, 4th Floor Hours: Wed 1:30-2:30
Damien Keane Email: dkeane@english.upenn.edu Office: Bennett Hall C7, 4th Floor Hours: Wed 11:00-12:30

DESCRIPTION:

This is a general introduction to twentieth-century British and American literature, with special emphasis on the varying conceptions of art and the artist that have characterized modernist and contemporary literary production. We will look at literary manifestoes and the demand to "make it new" in the first decades of the century; the invention of literary "modernism" and the promotion of certain key figures as the artistic geniuses of modernism; the politics of feminism and the place of the woman writer in modernist literature; the attempts by black writers in Harlem, the Caribbean, and London to construct a viable notion of the black artist; and the rise in recent decades of new forms of literary success and literary celebrity.
 

TEXTS:

The texts listed below are available from the Penn Book Center at 34th and Walnut. There is also a small coursepack available from Wharton Reprographics in the basement of the Wharton building.  Other readings as well as graphical texts can be accessed online via the class home page.

From Penn Book Center:

Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina. Plume.
Martin Amis, The Information.Vintage.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile.Harvest.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.Touchstone.
Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing.  Rutgers Univ. Press.
V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing. New York Review Press.
Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.Vintage.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.Harvest.
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts.Harvest.
 

REQUIREMENTS:

The format of this course is part lecture, part discussion.Although it is a large class, attendance is required, and you will be expected to come to class prepared to pose and answer questions about the texts.The texts we will be studying include some very challenging ones, and you should expect to spend about two to three hours per class meeting on the readings.There will be a brief, ten-minute exam on the readings every two weeks or so -- six exams in all, as indicated on the schedule.Exams will be administered at the very beginning of the class period and cannot be made up without prior arrangement, so arrive promptly.One exam score will be dropped; each of the others will count 10% of your final grade.A short essay of 4-6 pages will count 15% of your final grade and a longer essay of 8-10 pages will count 25%.The remaining 10% of your grade will be based on attendance and in-class performance.Keep in mind that a zero score in this last category (for habitual absences, lateness, inability to answer questions on the readings, etc.) will drop your final grade by half of a GPA point.There will be no final exam for this class.
 
 

SCHEDULE:

  I.  Avant-Gardes, Manifestoes, and the Violence of the New

JAN 8 Introduction: Overview of Syllabus and Requirements
JAN 10 Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) (also available here);
Giacomo Balla's paintings of a Speeding Car and Speeding Car with Light
Tzara,"Dadaism" (1918) (If interested, check out the International Dada 
Archive.); Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1913)

 
JAN 15 Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, manifestoes from Blast I, 7-45, 153-54; 
Pound poems (Blast 45-51); Lewis, drawings (Blast, va - viiia). 
(All readings from Blast in coursepack.)
JAN 17 Intro to cubism, Guggenheim museum (including artist biographies and images,
especially Picasso's Carafe, Jug, and Fruitbowl); Cubism FAQ; Intro to Surrealism; 
Andre Breton, "What is Surrealism?"; Salvadar Dali paintings; Paul Eluard, "Lady Love"

 
JAN 22 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, facsimile edition, Parts I-III. 
(Here is the standard edition of the poem online; there's also an 
annotated edition here.)                                          --EXAM #1--
JAN 24 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land  Parts IV-V

  II.  Lives of the Modernists: Stories, Myths, and Advertisements of Genius

JAN 29 Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Here is a good 
website on Stein)
JAN 31 Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 
(If interested, read or listen to Stein's poem "Completed Portrait of Picasso" and 
look at Picasso's famous Portrait of Gertrude Stein)

 
FEB 5 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
FEB 7 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast                           --EXAM #2--

 III. Women of Modernism: Outsiders Within

FEB 12 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Men and Art" and "Masculine Literature" from 
Andocentric Culture (1911); Mina Loy, "Feminist Manifesto" (1918) 
(Here is a good Mina Loy website); Virginia Woolf, "Mr Bennett and
Mrs. Brown"  (Loy and Woolf in coursepack); "Lewis, "Virginia Woolf"
FEB 14 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)              --SHORT ESSAYS DUE-- 
  [HERE IS THE ASSIGNMENT FOR SHORT ESSAYS]

 
FEB 19 Woolf, Between the Acts  (1939)
FEB 21 Woolf, Between the Acts   (1939)                            --EXAM #3--

IV.  From the Harlem Renaissance to Postcolonial London:

Writers of the Black Atlantic

FEB 26 Nella Larsen, Quicksand  (1928)
FEB 28 Nella Larsen, Quicksand  (1928)

 
 
MAR 5 Countee Cullen, "Heritage" (1925); Claude McKay, "Soviet Russia and the Negro" (1923); Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921), "Minstrel Man" (1925); "Afro-American Fragment" (1930), "One More S in the U.S.A." (1932), "Always the Same" (1932).  [Hughes poems available from LION].
MAR 7 Claude McKay, Selected poems from Harlem Shadows (1922)
                                                                                     --EXAM #4--

       SPRING BREAK
 
MAR 19 V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing (2000).  [The Nobel website has excellent RealPlayer videos of Naipaul.]
MAR 21 V. S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing (2000)

V.  Figures of Celebrity: The Contemporary Novel

and New Forms of Cultural Prestige

MAR 26 Martin Amis, The Information (1995), parts 1 and 2  --EXAM #5--
MAR 28 Martin Amis, The Information (1995), part 3 

 
 
APRIL 2 Martin Amis, The Information (1995), part 4
APRIL 4 Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

 
 
APRIL 9 Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
APRIL 11 Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)          --EXAM #6--

 
 
APRIL 16 Oprah Book Club materials on Oprah Website; Article on Author Reactions to Oprah Selection; LA Times Commentary on demise of Oprah Club; 
APRIL 18 Conclusions                                                                  --LONGER ESSAYS DUE--
                      HERE IS THE ASSIGNMENT FOR LONGER ESSAYS