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Cultural and Literary Expression in Modernity

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Abstract:: This course seeks to develop a nuanced understanding of the scope of cultural and literary expression in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. It attends to broad socio-historical happenings, from the birth of modernism in the late 19th century to the post-modern moment. In addition to literary modernism, the course will also take a brief look at the cultural production of modernism in art, music, architecture, cinema, philosophy, and drama. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: Define the terms modernism and modernity and explain the similarities and differences between these terms using specific works to illustrate comparison and contrast; List and explain the importance of a variety of social, cultural, and historical developments leading up to and occurring during the modern period; Cite and analyze the meaning of primary works of literature, poetry, art, music, architecture, cinema, philosophy and drama to illustrate the principle characteristics of modernism; Compare and contrast the literatures of both France and England from the start of the modern era (i.e., the turn of the twentieth century); Explain the impact of the Great War upon the development and expression of a variety of literary and artistic forms and especially on poetry in a number of genres; Describe the aftermath of World War I and its variety of effects upon literature and art and especially upon the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the novels of Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway; Define High Modernism and give examples of the tenets, ideals, and even the contradictions and self-contradictions of this movement in history and literature (and especially in both its Irish and British contexts); Define the terms postmodernism and deconstruction as well as the phrase Magical Realism and identify the most important characteristics of the movements, fields, theories, and texts associated with these terms; Explain the premises of postcolonial literature and literary theory and identify, describe, compare, and contrast postcolonial texts from range of national origins. (English Literature 204)

Subject:: Humanities
Grade Level:: Post-secondary
Collection:: Saylor Foundation

Literary Interpretation: Interpreting Poetry, Fall 2003

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Abstract:: Introduces practice and theory of literary criticism. Seminar focuses on topics such as the history of critical methods and techniques, and the continuity of certain subjects in literary history. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic: Theory and Use of Figurative Language. This seminar offers a course of readings in lyric poetry. It aims to enhance the student's capacity to understand the nature of poetic language and the enjoyment of poetic texts by treating poems as messages to be deciphered. The seminar will briefly touch upon the history of theories of figurative language since Aristotle and it will attend to the development of those theories during the last thirty years, noting the manner in which they tended to consider figures of speech distinct from normative or literal expression, and it will devote particular attention to the rise of theories that quarrel with this distinction. The seminar also aims to communicate a rough sense of the history of English-speaking poetry since the early modern period. Some attention will be paid as well to the use of metaphor in science.

Subject:: Humanities, Social Sciences
Grade Level:: Post-secondary
Collection:: MIT OpenCourseWare

Modern Poetry

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Abstract:: This course covers the body of modern poetry, its characteristic techniques, concerns, and major practitioners. The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance. Diverse methods of literary criticism are employed, such as historical, biographical, and gender criticism.

Subject:: Humanities
Grade Level:: Post-secondary
Collection:: Open Yale Courses

Modern Poetry, Spring 2002

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Abstract:: Consideration of some substantial twentieth-century poetic voices. Authors vary, but may include Moore, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound. This course considers some of the substantial early twentieth-century poetic voices in America. Authors vary, but may include Moore, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound. We'll read the major poems by the most important poets in English in the 20th century, emphazinig especially the period between post-WWI disillusionment and early WW II internationalism (ca. 1918-1940). Our special focus this term will be how the concept of "the Image" evolved during this period. The War had undercut beliefs in master-narratives of nationalism and empire, and the language-systems that supported them (religious transcendence, rationalism and formalism). Retrieving energies from the Symbolist movements of the preceding century, early 20th century poets began to rethink how images carry information, and in what ways the visual, visionary, and verbal image can take the place of transcendent beliefs. New theories of linguistics and anthropology helped to advance this interest in the artistic/religious image. So did Freud. So did Charlie Chaplin films. We'll read poems that pay attention both to this disillusionment and to the compensatory joyous attention to the image: to ideas of the poet-as-language-priest, aesthetic-experience-as-displaced-religious impulse, to poetry as faith, ritual, and form.

Subject:: Humanities, Social Sciences
Grade Level:: Post-secondary
Collection:: MIT OpenCourseWare

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Modern Poetry and Poetics

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Abstract:: This course will ask what makes poetry 'modern?' The student will discuss the cultural and political history of the period as well as the major movements that comprise 'modern poetry,' stopping to become acquainted with its noteworthy practitioners and perform close-readings of their works. By the end of this course, the student will have critically explored the concept of modern poetry, identifying its characteristic techniques, concerns, and figures. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: describe Modernity/Modernism as both a historical period and a movement in art and literature; define and differentiate between the terms modern, modernism, and modernity; define Victorianism and explain its relationship to Modernism; describe the nature of turn-of-the-twentieth-century poetry in both England and France; define Symbolism, Dandyism, Aestheticism, and Decadence; provide accounts of the origins of the Great War, life in Edwardian England, and World War II; list, compare, and contrast the major authors of the early 1900s, of World War I, the Lost Generation, World War II, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, High Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the post-WWII period. (English Literature 408)

Subject:: Humanities
Grade Level:: Post-secondary
Collection:: Saylor Foundation

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Cultural and Literary Expression in Modernity

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Browse: Keyword: T. S. Eliot

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Cultural and Literary Expression in Modernity

Literary Interpretation: Interpreting Poetry, Fall 2003

Modern Poetry

Modern Poetry, Spring 2002

Modern Poetry and Poetics

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