English 863:  Studies in 20th Century British Literature

Victorian Modernism

Professor Knowles                                                                                
Fall 1999

Course Description:

Was modernism a hoax?  Modernism is celebrated for “making it new,” but the transition was far less straightforward than Ezra Pound’s soundbite suggests.  The early work of T. S. Eliot is more indebted to 19th century symbolists than a precursor to the modern age, and Pound’s Personae barely escapes the decadence of Art for Art’s Sake.  Joyce’s Dubliners is saturated with Victorian cultural attitudes and Victorian novels.  Ford Madox Ford’s sentimental novel The Good Soldier is a shabby little French shocker in pre-war dress; E. M. Forster’s Howards End is a war story by accident.  And Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that sacred text of deconstruction, was intended for an audience of retired colonels leafing through the pages of Blackwood’s after a heavy dinner at the Club.  Henry James is crammed with Victorian governesses; Woolf’s The Voyage Out is Bleak House on a boat.  Even Freud, the patron saint of a new subjectivity, is a sanctimonious prude. 

This course intends to strip the veil from modernism’s origins, and reveal a group of artists finding their way into a new world, unable to completely make it new, unwilling to completely detach themselves from their 19th century upbringings, and uncompromising in their eagerness to have it both ways.  Pound’s highest praise, when the first section of Ulysses came out in The Little Review, was that “one thinks of Flaubert”:  Modernists were brought up on a steady diet of Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells, and to some extent they never got over it.  By reading the early work of the card-carrying revolutionaries of the literary movements of the 1910s and 20s, and tracing their dependence on the literature and values of an earlier generation, a clearer picture of what modernism was can begin to emerge.

Course Logistics:

            We meet in Derby 047 from 3:30 to 5:18 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  My office is Denney 570:  office hours this quarter are on Fridays from 9-12.  Appointments can also be made, in class, by phone (292-5786), or via e-mail (knowles.1@osu.edu).  E-mail is likely to be useful throughout the course as a place for trying out questions, comments, and ideas.

Course Texts:

All course texts are available from SBX.  Readings relevant to each week’s subject will be available for you to copy:  every Friday, I will place the readings for the week following in a manila folder marked “English 863:  Knowles” on the bookshelf behind the copier in the main office.

Arnold Bennett             Anna of the Five Towns

Joseph Conrad             “Heart of Darkness”

T. S. Eliot                     Inventions of the March Hare

Ford Madox Ford        The Good Soldier

E. M. Forster               Howards End

Sigmund Freud             Interpretation of Dreams

Henry James                 “The Turn of the Screw”

James Joyce                 Dubliners

Ezra Pound                   Personae

Virginia Woolf              The Voyage Out

Course Requirements:

            Two requirements:  an oral presentation on any of the nine authors studied in weeks 3-11, and a 15-page paper due on the Monday of finals week (December 6).  Attendance is required, and your voice in discussion will be crucial.

            Oral presentations will be held in the first 48 minutes of the second class devoted to each author, beginning in week 3.  (Note that James and Conrad are studied together:  you may present on one or both of those authors.)  For the oral presentation you can do anything you like, reading the text or texts in any way that strikes your fancy.  You can present individually or jointly.  Presenters should arrange to see me a few days beforehand to discuss the possibilities. 

            The paper should be on either any other work by an author we study, or a work by any other writer from the modernist period, demonstrating in either case why the work is 1) brand-new, 2) a continuation of earlier ideas held in the late 19th century, or 3) a combination of both.  Your paper is therefore a means of extending this course beyond the parameters of the ten-week period we have been given, allowing you to ask yourself what other writer or what other work you would have liked to study, and situate that writer or that work within the dynamic that the course explores.  Possibilities for other works by the writers we study include, but are not limited to, the following:  Mrs. Dalloway, A Passage to India, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Lord Jim, “What Maisie Knew,” Hilda Lessways, Parade’s End, The Sacred Wood, The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.  Possibilities for other writers include, but are not limited to, the following:  D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey, Wilfred Owen, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, John Synge.  See me or e-mail me when you decide on a work or a writer you would like to study for the paper.

Course Calendar:

Week 1

Th September 23          Introduction:  Eminent Victorians

Week 2

T September 28           Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns

Th September 30          Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns

Week 3

T October 5                 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Th October 7               Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

                                    Presentations on Woolf

Week 4

T October 12               James and Conrad, “The Turn of the Screw” and “Heart of Darkness”

Th October 14             James and Conrad, “The Turn of the Screw” and “Heart of Darkness”

                                    Presentations on James and Conrad

Week 5

T October 19               Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Th October 21             Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

                                    Presentations on Freud

Week 6

T October 26               T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare

Th October 28             T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare

                                    Presentations on Eliot

Week 7

T November 2              E. M. Forster, Howards End

Th November 4            E. M. Forster, Howards End

                                    Presentations on Forster

Week 8

T November 9              Ezra Pound, Personae

Th November 11          Veteran’s Day:  No class

Week 9

T November 16            Ezra Pound, Personae

                                    Presentations on Pound

Th November 18          James Joyce, Dubliners

Week 10

T November 23            James Joyce, Dubliners           

                                    Presentations on Joyce

Th November 25          Thanksgiving Day:  No class

Week 11

T November 30            Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

Th December 2            Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

                                    Presentations on Ford

Finals Week

M December 6           Final paper (15 pages) due