123047 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature (2021W)

Pandemics, ecological crises, economic collapse, the end of history - the current historical moment appears to be uniquely marked by a sense of impending apocalypse. And yet, as we will see in this course, images and narratives of the 'end of days' have long been a standard of cultural representations and practices, used historically towards a wide range of ideological, affective, and political ends. In this course we will learn how to read these ideological currents in diverse cultural texts and practices as they relate to the intersecting categories of race, gender, sexuality, class. These discussions will be focussed on poetry, prose and drama from the period of early-to-high modernism (c. 1880- 1945), including Yeats, Chesterton, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Kafka, Artaud, Barnes, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, Calvino, Kate O’Brien and Flann O’Brien. We will also consider other forms of the modernist apocalyptic imaginary, including early expressionist film, music and visual art. Literary modernism was shot through with a rhetoric of apocalyptic crisis, revelation and “making it new” via diverse millennial visions of artistic, cultural, religious and political transformation. By focusing on literary modernist representations of the 'end of the world' in diverse contexts, genres and representational modes, together we will consider how, in the first half of the 20th century, the limits and meanings of history, truth and the human were being redrawn and remade.