Comparative European Modernism: Representing Subjectivity

Modernism is often characterized as a rejection of Victorian Realism and the Victorian ethos more generally. In its place a more experimental fiction emerged, in which the “reality” of realism was no longer located simply in an objective, stable, coherent, universally recognizable world but in the subjective realm of consciousness. The rupture with the old world order following WWI and the insights that emerged from the new discipline of psychology seemed to require new literary forms. From Marcel Proust’s mapping of memory, to Virginia Woolf’s “realism of the mind,” to Kafka’s externalization of inward experience, Modernism is unabashedly enthralled with the encounter between subjectivity and the world, relentlessly immersing the reader in the thoughts, moods, and perceptions of its characters and bending time itself to accord with consciousness.  In this course we will study the relationship between subjectivity and the formal innovations that seek to capture it.

Proust, Woolf, and Kafka will be the primary authors under discussion supplemented by theoretical readings, which may include work by Henri Bergson, William James, Jean Genette, Winfold Gombrowicz and others.