Modernism
and Revolution:
Literature,
Culture, and Thought
in
the 1920s
Phil
Wegner
Monday,
E1-E3 (7:20-10:20 p.m.)
Turlington
4112
Office: Turlington
4115
Office Hours: Tuesday,
1-3 p.m.;
and by
appointment
Phone:
392-6650.
ex. 261 (office)
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pwegner/home.htm
In his landmark essay, "Modernity and
Revolution," Perry Anderson argues that one of the indispensable
coordinates
for the efflorescence of literary and cultural experimentation that we
now know
as modernism was "the imaginative proximity of social revolution." In this course, we will take Anderson's
insight--along with the formulation of the modernist "fidelity" and the
"passion
for the real" that can be extracted from Alain Badiou"s books, Ethics
and The Century--as
our starting point for an investigation of a rich variety of modernist
texts"manifestos, novels, poems, films, and philosophical
treatises"that appear
in the crucial decade of the 1920s.
For the writers, artists, and intellectuals of this decade, a
series of
dramatic upheavals--the German revolutions of 1918-19, the Hungarian
Revolution
of 1919, the struggle for Irish independence (1916-22), and, most
significantly
of all, the Russian Revolution of 1917--promised to sweep away the
ossified
institutions and practices of the old world. This
lived possibility of social and cultural change was
central to the work of all of these figures, enabling them both to
break with
the artistic and intellectual conventions that ruled their times and
places and
to imagine wholly new ways of being in the world. It
is precisely this sense of hope and possibility that also
perhaps accounts for why we experience these works as so alien
today--as
the
noted art historian T.J. Clark writes, for us who live in a seemingly
interminable posthistorical present, "the modernist past is a ruin, the
logic
of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp. . . This is a world,
and a
vision of history, more lost to us than Uxmal or Annaradapurah or
Neuilly-en-Donjon." However, as Walter Benjamin also famously claims,
"In the
ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively
than in
lesser buildings, however well preserved they are."
Thus, we will explore these works with an eye not only to
beginning to grasp something of their unique "architectures" and the
radically
other historical situation from which they emerge, but also toward the
possibility of "repeating" (to borrow a concept from Slavoj Zizek)
their
achievements in our own time.
Texts
Alain
Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Alain
Badiou, The Century
Walter
Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Andre
Breton, Nadja
Le
Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture
Sergei M.
Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
Sigmund
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
James Joyce,
Ulysses: The Corrected Text
Harry Blamires, The
New Bloomsday Book, 3rd edition
(recommended)
Wyndham
Lewis, Tarr
Alain L
Locke, ed., The New Negro
Georg
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
Georg
Lukács, In Defense of History and Class Consciousness
Lu Xun, Call to
Arms
Boris
Pilnyak, The Naked Year
Cesar Vallejo,
Trilce
Virginia Woolf, To
the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf, A Room
of One"s Own (recommended)
All these texts are available at Goerings
Book Store (1717 NW 1st Avenue).
Required essays will be made available, at various spaces and
places, as
the semester progresses.
Aims and Methods
1.
Full presence in every spatial, ontological, existential, and
intellectual sense of the word, as well as active and engaged
participation in
the seminar discussions. Given the demand for this course, I assume
that all of
you are looking forward as much as I am to having the opportunity for a
serious
and careful engagement with these texts.
Thus, the most general expectation that I have for this semester
is that
all of you intend to read these works, and to do so in a responsible
and
rigorous fashion, and in a spirit of good faith and intellectual
camaraderie. I would ask then that
you make every effort to engage in, to use a much abused term, a dialogue with these works, being attentive to their
respective
voices, acknowledging their particular historical and otherwise
contingent
beings in the world, and finally working to imagine how we today might
best
retool the insights and modes of analysis of their various "unfinished
projects." In this way, I hope that we will develop a much more complex
and
profitable understanding of both the power and originality of these
arguments
and traditions.
2. In order to facilitate and enrich our
discussion of these works, I want to ask each of you to be responsible
for
introducing and situating each week's readings. As
I imagine all of our work fundamentally to be a
collective project, you will do this in groups of three, with each
group being
responsible for the readings on two different occasions.
Each group will be asked both to
provide a brief introduction to the material and to serve as
general "experts" on the readings for that week.
Your group can take a variety of approaches to this task: you
may want
to highlight some of the central issues the readings address; briefly
outline
their main arguments; note the ways they engage with what has come
before;
place them in historical, intellectual, and political contexts; note
connections to other models and practices; give overviews of some of
the
secondary readings on these works; offer some questions for discussion;
and so
forth. I only ask that you keep
the opening comments brief (15 minutes maximum total) so that we
can
begin our general discussion as soon as possible. I also hope that your
groups
will continue to work together throughout the semester, sharing ideas,
giving
support, discussing research projects, drinking beer, and other
important
tasks. I will be very happy to
meet with your group beforehand to suggest some secondary readings and
discuss
approaches and tactics.
3.
Some events worth marking on your calendar this spring: February
7-9,
the department"s 7th annual American Cultures Symposium;
February
22-23, the Florida Writers Festival; March 21-22, the 6th
annual
Comics Conference; and March 27-39, the granddaddy of them all, the 10th
annual Marxist Reading Group Conference.
Consult the department website for schedules and more
information. I ask that all enrolled
students plan
to attend some of the sessions and events to see many of your faculty
in action
and to support your fellow graduate students.
4. For the major written component of the course, I will ask each of you to develop an independent research program, which will take one of two forms: either a) two shorter essays of 10-15 pages in length examining the questions or issues raised by the material in more depth, or drawing connections between these works and other areas of interest; OR, b) a major critical research project of some 25-30 pages in length. The aim of the longer project will be one of the following: 1) a critical engagement with some of the works we discuss in class; 2) a further independent examination of the issues raised by the theoretical, literary, or filmic work we examine; 3) a discussion drawing upon some of the recommended secondary or additional readings or 4) an original reading of some other texts of interest "be they literary, theoretical, filmic, architectural, or otherwise" from the decade of the 1920s, deploying the concepts and models we elaborate during the course of the semester. I would also like to ask that all Ph.D students pursue option b, with the goal of producing an essay that will serve either as the basis of a dissertation chapter or a publishable essay (or even both). I ask each of you who choose this second option to turn in a detailed paper proposal, complete with bibliography, about a month before the paper is due. If you require additional time to work on this project, I am happy to allow you to do so. However, in order to avoid extending the course indefinitely, I expect that the project will be completed by the end of the summer terms; work turned in after that time should not expect to receive extensive comments.
Tentative
Discussion Schedule
1.
January 7
Introduction: Rethinking Modernism
Readings: Alain Badiou,
Ethics: An
Essay on the Understanding
of Evil
Perry Anderson,
"Modernity and
Revolution"
2.
January 14 Introduction
II: The Passion for the Real
Readings: Alain Badiou, The Century
T.S. Eliot,
"The Wasteland" (1922)
Saint-John
Perse, Anabasis (1924)
3.
January 21 MLK
Day: NO CLASS
3.
January 28
Philosophy and Revolution
Readings:
Georg Lukács, History and Class
Consciousness (1923);
Luk"cs, A Defense
of History
and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (1925 or 1926)
