סילבוס מודרניזם אירופאי European Modernism

The seminar will deal with exemplary figures and texts of the “classical modernism” in European literature, i.e. roughly the period from 1890 to 1930.
The class will proceed through a series of close readings of selected texts and passages. Particular attention will be paid to the conflict of psychological and linguistic-literary categories in the analysis of the modernist text. The paradoxes inherent to the concept of modernism–to be the event in history that repeats the history of the attempt to do away with History altogether; the desire to strip away from language in the name of language–will be a central concern of the discussion.
Taught in English; texts will be provided in the original (French, English, Italian, Portuguese) as well as in English translation where necessary.

Prospective Syllabus

1st week

1st session
Introduction – the notion of “modernism” – the “field” of modernism: subject and
writing – Nietzsche, Mauthner, Hofmannsthal and the question of language

2nd session
A paradigm of modernity? “Stream of consciousness” (William James, Edouard Dujardin, Virgina Woolf et al.)

2nd week

1st session
Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu – From Time and Memory to Space and
Forgetting

2nd session
Walter Benjamin, “Zum Bilde Proust” and other essays – The Task of the Modern Critic

3rd week
1st session
Franz Kafka, Oktavhefte – Writing, Time, Form

2nd session
Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge – The
Unrecognizable Prose Poem

4th week
1st session
Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego – ‘Heterography’

2nd session
Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno – Consciousness as Unconscious

5th week
1st session
James Joyce, The Portrait of the Author / Stephen Hero – Epiphany and the Instant of Modernity

2nd session
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake – Can language(s) be counted (on)?

6th week
1st session
Poetry from Stיphane Mallarmי to Francis Ponge – Crises of Verse and Opinions on
Flowers Changed

2nd session
Hollow Man, Men Without Qualities, Hingemachte Mהnner – Scenes of the Subject without Subjectivity in T. S. Eliot, Robert Musil and Daniel Paul Schreber