Vincent Sherry

James Joyce's "Ulysses" is probably the most important novel of the twentieth century, and possibly of English literary history. It is also the funniest, but perhaps also-at least initially-the most difficult. As such, it lends itself to the sustained single focus of a 400-level English course. We will read the book first of all for its intrinsic interest, examining the use of the Homeric parallel as well as of the various organizational schemes Joyce devised in writing the novel. We will also reference the novel to a number of external contexts: as an example of the emergent project of literary Modernism; as an imaginative remaking of the Irish political and religious culture in which Joyce grew up; as a vision of a new Europe in the aftermath of the First World War; as a daring experiment in fashioning new gender imaginaries, for female as well as male characters; and, most of all, as a reinvention of the form of the novel, which extends tendencies in modern linguistic thought to unprecedented dimensions. These considerations will be supplemented and enriched by various critical accounts of the novel, ranging from helpful expositions to understandings of the novel's impact on subsequent literary history.

In this course we will be reading the major works of Virginia Woolf, including her non-fiction prose as well as her novels and short stories. We will be charting her development as an important voice in feminist criticism and politics, and we will be reading her evolution in relation to a broader backdrop of English and European social and political history. We will examine her reactions to the Women´s Suffrage Movement and pay special attention to her involvement in the First World War and her ongoing, changing response to its legacy in the long postwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. Our secondary reading will be drawn from a wide variety of critical attitudes and practices, including the interpretive approaches of biography, new historicism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. The major novels are "The Voyage Out," "Jacob´s Room," "Mrs Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," "Orlando," and "The Waves," while the essential works of non-fiction prose are "A Room of One´s Own" and "Three Guineas." We will synchronize our reading of these texts with excerpts from her diary and letters.

Modern-IST poetry: the caps for the suffix put in headline style the assertive, self-conscious feeling about being modern that this poetry so conspicuously features. For modernist poetry reinvents traditional meters and turns them into the cadences of the contemporary, it takes older-fashioned descriptions and recasts these as images of the instantaneous; it breaks with prosodic and rhetorical traditions to establish new, identifiably "modern" diction and rhythms. We will track this impulse on a transatlantic stage, reading it also in view of a pan-European background, as we situate modernism historically as well as conceptually, We will move from Baudelaire in Paris and Dickinson in America to Imagism and other international avant-gardes, and then engage with major works of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, David Jones, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Gertrude Stein. We will be reading their poems intensively as well as extensively—reading down and into the intricacies of rhythm and image, and reading out into the external contexts that provide the historical content and political depth of this verse. A long and lengthening tradition of literary criticism for modernist poetry will provide a variety and particularity of approaches, offering the critical and interpretive works of old and new historicisms and modern cultural studies and race theory as well as psychoanalytic and feminist, Marxist and post-colonial and post-structuralist, ways of reading.

The Great War of 1914-1918 is one of the most momentous events in history. We can approach its broad European import by reading its literatures comparatively. Far wider than the concerns of any one national ideology, the literature of record represents a profound crisis in the European cultural imaginary. A number of critical and interpretive issues will be in play in our readings, which will move through three major phases. We begin with the powerful immediacy of trench poetry (1914-1919), develop into the constructed narratives of the great postwar novels and memoirs (1920-1931), and then turn toward the retrospect of the 1930s, which is also the prospect on the next, now inevitable, war. The authors featured include combatant and civilian writers, names well-known and not so famous: Mann, Apollinaire, Owen, Pound, Cocteau, H.D., Woolf, Maurois, West, Celine, Joyce, Musil, Eliot, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Graves, Hardy, Trakl, Stramm, Lichtenstein, Péguy, Barbusse, Manning, Jünger, Zweig, Brittain, and Kroner. All readings for class will be in English translation. Our secondary literature will provide approaches to specific texts and models of literary and cultural history that represent the longer-range importance of the war.

It is usually assumed that literary Modernism, in its more provocative or convention-dismaying character, is descended from a sensibility flourishing in the mid-late 19th century, a conglomerate of counter-cultural energies that is often assigned the group identity of Decadence. We will recover the substance of this connection as our major line of critical inquiry over the course of the term. The major figures of literary Decadence include a pan-European roster, featuring Baudelaire, Huysmans, Swinburne, Pater, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Wilde, and Beerbohm, while literary Modernism will feature the major writers of Anglo-American and Anglo-Irish modernism, specifically Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Joyce, Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. Some of the work of the course will be to survey and understand the constructions literary Modernists make of Decadents, as individual writers, and of Decadence, as a class and category of art. We will probe their understanding of "outsider" art in relation to "mainstream" codes and practices and also pay special attention to the two periods' special understanding of their own moments in historical time (the declining state of empire, new scientific ideas of entropy, and the feeling of late days in national fortunes) as establishing conditions of their identities. A course-pack consisting chiefly of critical readings will help us to read the literary texts closely and to map our analyses into larger theoretical formulations.

This course focuses on the cultural understanding and literary representation of time in the first half of the twentieth century. Our authors include Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and a number of other canonical and non-canonical writers. In their novels, novellas, and short fiction, these writers take account of a profound change in the metrics and meanings of time, which, following the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time at the end of the nineteenth century, shifted the experience of time from a "natural" (daily, seasonal, annual) to an "artificial' (numerical, standard, global) measure. This new standard time, also known as "rational" or "public" time, stimulated interesting, significant, and lasting resistance from major artists and thinkers and writers. What we know as "the stream of consciousness," for instance, witnesses a new emphasis on "private" internal time as a reaction to rational, public time. We will follow this evolving sense of time into and through some of the cataclysmic, not so "rational" events in real historical time: two World Wars (both undergone and anticipated), the rising and spreading crises of Empire, a global financial meltdown, and the near-revolutions achieved by the women's and workers' movements. Here the understanding of the meaning and shape of history and the direction of historical time is richly conflicted, and the literature of the period takes the measure of this duress. Our reading will include work from the British Isles as well as colonial (soon to be postcolonial) locations.

This course provides beginning students of English with a chronological outline of modern literature in English from Romanticism to the present. It introduces them to the central themes, genres, and forces that have shaped the modern history of literature as well as the tools, vocabularies, and critical practices of literary studies. We will organize our semester around five themes: literary revolutions; questions of genre; subjectivity and authorship; gender, sexuality, and identity; modernism. We will study texts from Britain/Ireland, the United States, and at least one example of global literature in English.

This course introduces students to the study of literature. It focuses on the most intense of literary forms, poetry, to develop a broad range of interpretive abilities. The course aims to give students a critical vocabulary for analysis; an instinct for discovering and evaluating literary problems; and a sense of different historical periods of poetic production. Students will acquire a basic understanding of the line, prosody, and figurative language. Writing and speaking well about poetry is a crucial goal of this class, and students will practice different forms of engagement. Questions of evidence and sound argumentation will be important, but the class does not draw an exact line between critical and creative kinds of writing and thinking. Instead, it wishes to cultivate lively exchanges between these poles.

This course takes the operations of "fantasy" as a basic but extreme application of the literary imagination and builds an introduction to college literature in following the many genres and forms that fantasy has taken. It has been used to express possibilities both in the psychological and political realms, from private dream to social vision, and the selections in the course-pack have been drawn from a wide variety of literary genres and periods. The psychological readings, which will feature the appearance of the "uncanny" double or weird familiar in modern literature, include selections from Freud, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Malamud, while the texts of social vision, which offer radically imaginative ways of envisioning political possibility, move from Poe and Hawthorne to Margaret Atwood, Flannery O'Connor, Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter, Faulkner and Kafka. Ideally, the student will develop an acquaintance with the manifold forms fantasy has found in literature and come to understand as well the revealing lens it directs at the material of real experience.