LIT110 Modernist Poetry: Course Descriptor, August 2007

LIT110 Modernist Poetry Rajiv C Krishnan

In this course, we will discuss poems by such figures as WB Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, HD, and Marianne Moore, and try to arrive at a basic characterization of Modernism. We will also look at the work of artists and philosophers active during the period. You will be required to do a series of short assignments and undertake a small research project under my supervision. Your report on the project should be a paper of about 20-25 pages, typed, double-spaced, and following MLA specifications in matters of style and documentation. There will also be a final exam towards the end of the semester. The internal assessment will be worth 75% of the marks, and comprises short assignments (50%) and the Project Report (25%). The end semester exam will account for the remaining 25%.

This is a writing-intensive course, so you should be prepared to write a lot. I am planning to run a writing workshop every two weeks or so during one of our classes. I expect you to read as many of the items listed in the list of secondary sources (at least two books) in addition to the primary materials.

Your project will have to address a topic arrived at through discussion during tutorials, and will ordinarily have to be based upon readings of one or more of the following texts:

0 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
0 Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
0 Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos
0 TS Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations
0 TS Eliot, The Waste Land
0 Marianne Moore, Observations
0 Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
0 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
0 HD, Sea Garden.

Those who wish to take this course for LCS credits are welcome to do projects which draw upon Cultural Studies paradigms of analysis.

You can use either of the following anthologies of Modernist poetry for the course:

0 The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Edited by Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair
0 Modernism: An Anthology. Edited by Lawrence Rainey


Class hours: M W F 8-11 am


The Assignments
0 100 Poems 01: Journal
0 100 Poems 02: Journal
0 Attendance plus postings of class summaries (20x100 words)
0 Marianne Moore: “The Steeple Jack”
0 Marianne Moore: “The Jerboa”
0 Ezra Pound: “Canto 1”
0 Gertrude Stein: from Tender Buttons
0 Wallace Stevens: “Anecdote of the Jar”
0 Modernism and Imperial Authority
0 Modernist Art: analysis of any one work
0 Modernist philosophy: short introduction to any one philosopher
0 Assignment based upon the Extracts
0 TS Eliot: The Waste Land
0 Critical reception of The Waste Land
0 Reading report on any one Modernist collection
0 Revision of any one assignment
0 Compiling the Working Bibliography for the Project
0 The Portfolio
0 Research Methodology

Modernism—A Reading List for LIT110
Primary Materials

We will read poems by the following poets during the course:
WB Yeats
Rainer Maria Rilke
Guillaume Apollinaire
Gertrude Stein
Ezra Pound
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Hilda Doolittle (HD)
Marianne Moore
Jean Toomer
Francis Ponge
e e cummings
TS Eliot
and John Cage.



SECONDARY MATERIALS: A Short List

Altieri, Charles. “Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry.” PMLA 91 (1976): 101-14.
Bell, Ian F. A. Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound. London: Methuen, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-51.
Bigliazzi, Silvia. “The Sign of Silence: Pound, Eliot, and the Image.” Paideuma 26.2-3 (Fall & Winter 1997): 211-225.
Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane, ed. Modernism, 1890-1930. Hassocks: Harvester, 1978.
Brown, Dennis. Intellectual Dynamics within the Literary Group—Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot: The Men of 1914. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. London: Hyman, 1987.
Chandran, K. Narayana. Singer in the City: Studies in Modern American Poetry. Hyderabad: American Studies Research Centre, n. d.
Chefdor, Monique, Ricardo Quinones and Albert Wachtel, eds. Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.
Chiari, Joseph. The Aesthestics of Modernism. London: Vision, 1970.
Childs, John Steven. Modernist Form: Pound’s Style in the Early Cantos. London: Associated UP, 1986.
Cianci, Giovanni and Peter Nicholls. Ruskin and Modernism. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Cianci, Giovanni. “Futurism and the English Avant-Garde: The Early Pound between Imagism and Vorticism.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 6 (1981): 3-39.
Clearfield, Andrew M. These Fragments Have I Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research P, 1984.
Coffman, Stanley K., Jr. Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1951.
Cork, Richard. Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age. 2 vols. London: Fraser, 1976.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way. The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.
Davie, Donald. Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry. 1955. Postscript added. London: Routledge, 1976.
Diepeveen, Leonard. Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.
Easthope, Anthony. “Eliot, Pound and the Subject of Postmodernism.” CIEFL Bulletin 1.2 (December 1989): 1-10.
Easthope, Anthony. Poetry and Phantasy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Eisenstein, Samuel A. “Literature and Myth.” College English 29.5 (1968): 369-373.
Ellmann, Maud. “Ezra Pound: The Erasure of History.” Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Benington, and Robert Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Sussex: Harvester, 1987.
Farr, Dennis. “Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists.” Burlington Magazine 98 (August 1956): 279-80.
Feder, Lillian. Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Fenollosa, Ernest and Ezra Pound. “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” The Little Review 6 (September 1919): 62-64; (October 1919): 57-64; (November 1919): 55-60; and (December 1919): 68-72.
Fenollosa, Ernest and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Ed. Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights,1936.
Fingesten, Peter. The Eclipse of Symbolism. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1970.
Ford, Ford Madox. “Impressionism—Some Speculations.” Poetry 2 (August 1913): 177-187; (September 1913): 215-225.
Gage, John T. In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.
Gamache, Lawrence. “Defining Modernism: A Religious and Literary Correlation.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 25.2 (1992): 63-81.
Gardner, Joann. “Yeats, Pound, and the Inheritance of the Nineties.” Journal of Modern Literature 14 (1988): 431-43.
Gelpi, Albert. A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Giles, Steve, ed. Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Gould, Eric. Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.
Gregory, Horace and Murya Zaturenska. A History of American Poetry 1900-1940. New York: Harcourt, 1946.
Hamilton, Scott. Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1954.
Heinemann, F. H. Existentialism and the Modern Predicament. New York: Harper, 1953.
Hughes, Glenn. Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1960.
Ingram, Claudia. “Sharing Strategies with the Discourses of Authority: Ezra Pound and the Legal ‘Modernists.’” Paideuma 24.1 (Spring 1995): 39‑52.
Johnson, William A. “Toward a Redefinition of Modernism.” Boundary 2 (1974): 539‑56.
Joyce, James. Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. Ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. London: Cape, 1956.
Juhasz, Suzanne. Metaphor and the Poetry of Williams, Pound and Stevens. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1974.
Kayman, Martin A. The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.
Kronick, Joseph G. American Poetics of History: From Emerson to the Moderns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984.
Last, R. W. Hans Arp: The Poet of Dadaism. London: Wolff, 1969.
Leavis, F. R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960.
Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Levin, Harry. “What Was Modernism?” Varieties of Literary Experience. Ed. Stanley Burnshaw. New York: New York UP, 1962. 307‑29.
Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. Beacon Hill: Beacon, 1957.
Longenbach, James. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.
Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Materer, Timothy. Vortex: Pound, Eliot and Lewis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.
McDonald, Gail. Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot and the American University. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
McGann, Jerome. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
McNeil, Lynda D. Recreating the World/Word: The Mythic Mode as Symbolic Discourse. New York: State U of New York P, 1992.
North, Michael. The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1987.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1968.
Pound's Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy. London: Tate Gallery, 1985.
Riddel, Joseph N. “Decentering the Image: The ‘Project’ of ‘American’ Poetics?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josuè V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 322-358.
Schneidau, Herbert N. “Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound.” Modern Philology 65 (February 1968): 214-17.
Schneidau, Herbert N. Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
Sherry, Vincent. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Shlovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique” Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 3-24.
Spears, Monroe K. Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth-Century Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.
Stead C. K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
Szabolcsi, Mikós. “Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions.” New Literary History 3.1 (Autumn 1971): 49-70.
Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993.
Walker, Jeffery. Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem: Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, Olson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.
Weisstein, Ulrich. “Vorticism: Expressionism English Style.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 13 (1964): 28-40.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. New York: Scribner's, 1959.
Woolf, Viginia. “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown.” A Modernist Reader: Modernism in England 1910-1930. Ed. Peter Faulkner. London: Batsford, 1986. 112‑128.