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Professor Priya Joshi
English 45C, Fall 2004
M,W 11-12pm, 120 Latimer
Office Hours: MW 3:15-4:45pm
Office: 451 Wheeler Hall
Phone: 510-642-2377
e-mail: pjoshi@socrates.berkeley.edu

The Course

This course is an introduction to modernism, that period in literary history that Perry Anderson has called a "portmanteau concept," and that we might likewise today frustratedly conclude was a suitcase of largely failed aesthetic and political impulses. Given the survey nature of this lecture, we will outline in broad strokes some of the constitutive moments of several Anglo-American modernisms from among the work of Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, T.E. Lawrence, Woolf, Williams, Pound, and Faulkner. We will pay considerable attention to doing close literary and cultural readings of these texts and will ask probing questions of form and function.

Note: Given the extensive use of literary history and intertextuality by most of the figures we will be reading, students are strongly urged to have completed 45A and 45B prior to enrolling in this course.