Session 4 I'll lecture for some of this week's class. If I lecture I'll probably repeat what I've been thinking and publishing on the subject. To give you a sense of my current thinking on these issues, I append a recent essay (by me) on Ezra Pound and how modernism uses translation. You might as well read it as to have me repeat it to you-we can use the time more efficiently in this way and can open more comfortably into conversation. See the study materials section for the referenced essay.
Session 7
I'll lecture for some of this week's class. If I lecture I'll probably repeat what I've been thinking and publishing on the subject. To give you a sense of my current thinking on these issues, I append a recent essay (by me) on Charlie Chaplin and how modernism poetry uses image-techniques derived from film. The point is not only that the poems allude to Chaplin, but that they often derive their own sense of literary aesthetics, paradoxically, from film aesthetics. You might as well read the argument as to have me repeat it to you. I should mention that this essay is a bit self-reflexive-it deals with the dynamic of teaching MIT students-and that it's strictly a draft. I'll be interested to hear if its account of MIT classroom dynamics reflects your own sense of those dynamics. See the study materials section for the referenced essay.
| 1 | Introductions
Origins of Modernism I
Symbolist Textuality, Aestheticism, Relation to Image the Flaneur and the City | | 2 | Origins of Modernism II
The End of Victorianism
Ethics and Aesthetics
Oratory and the Performative
Darwin and Social Change | | 3 | Origins of Modernism: III
World War I
The End of the Discourse of Rationalism
The Empire Break Down | | 4 | Modernism and Orientalism
The Ideogram
Gender and Translation ('Feminizing' Asia)
The War at Home
F.S. Flint | | 5 | The Modern Image and Sculpture
Early Wittgenstein and the Status of the Image | | 6 | Montage and Film-history
Radio Aesthetics
The Photographic Image and the Liteary Image
The Image as Repository of Desire | | 7 | Chaplin as Everyman, Chaplin as Subversive
Modern Irony and Chaplin's Sentimentalilty
'Machine' Aesthetics | | 8 | The Psychology of Self-revelation
Time, Change, and the Image in 'Prufrock'
The Image as Repoistory of Meaning | | 9 | The "Mythic Method" and History
The Working Papers to "The Waste Land", and Ezra Pound's Editing
Anthropology, Distance, and Irony: "The Golden Bough" | | 10 | The Status of Allusion
Speech, Speechlessness, and the Buddha | | 11 | Williams: "Waste Land" as the "Great Catastrophe"
Free Verse and the American Idiom
"'Medical' Aesthetics: Why a 'Contagious Hospital'?" | | 12 | Words as Things
Constructionism and Objectivism
The Gendered 'Gaze'
Class Distinctions in High Modernism | | 13-14 | Harlem Renaissance
Jazz, Race, and Gender | | 15 | Woolf
Mr. Ramsay and the Limits of Reason: Lines
Mrs. Ramsay and the Expansion of Consciousness: Circles | | 16 | Woolf (cont.)
Lily's Androgynous Vision | | 17 | Yeats
Pound
Stevens
Doolittle
Auden
Conquest
Ashbery
Art, Disillusionment, and Modernist Form
Aestheticism as Ritual, as Religion | | 18 | Yeats (cont.)
"Sailing to Byzantium": What's the Problem? [Stanzas 1 and 2] | | 19 | Yeats (cont.)
"Sailing to Byzantium": Where to Look for a Resolution? [Stanzas 3 and 4] | | 20 | Yeats (cont.)
Stevens
Stevens, Repetition, and Language: Emerson meets Heidegger | | 21 | Stevens (cont.)
Displaced Spirituality and Modernrist Compensaion ["Sunday Morning" - Stanzas 1 and 2] | | 22 | Stevens (cont.)
Versions of "Sunday Morning"
Transcendenence and the Image
Keats and Stevens: The Last Stanza of "Sunday Morning" | | 23-25 | Student Presentations |
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