Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature (368-0-20)
Topic
Landscape and Technology in 20th C Literature
Instructors
Christine Froula
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-343: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM
Overview of class
Conrad's Marlow piloting a rattletrap steamship carrying armed "pilgrims" up the Congo; W. E. B. Du Bois's steel princess at the top of a skyscraper; unprecedented war machines shelling tiny, fragile human bodies in fields of red poppies in France; Hemingway driving an ambulance on the Italian front; Chaplin's Tramp cast opposite a zeppelin in a censored wartime short film; Katherine Mansfield's outlaw train journey to the Front; Eliot's London typist home at teatime with her gramophone; the clanking newsroom presses and the printed newspapers, ads, posters, and flyers that talk, beckon, call and cry to Dubliners in Ulysses's river-threaded cityscapes; Toomer's shell-shocked veteran; Williams's American landscape with "power-house" like "a red brick chair /90 feet high"; Forster's train to the Caves and automobile accident on the Marabar Road in A Passage to India; Mrs Dalloway's aeroplane writing on the sky over open-mouthed Londoners; Giles Oliver's hallucination of Hitler bombing the village church to smithereens on the festival day of the annual pageant in 1939 in Woolf's Between the Acts; Zora Neale Hurston's anthropologial petromodernism; Time magazine bringing world-shaking news of the bombing of Hiroshima to the American Army prison camp in Pisa, where it reverberates in Pound's Pisan Cantos; motor transport and water-pumps in Salih's Season of Migration to the North: twentieth-century literature abounds in material and social landscapes marked by technologies that shaped--and continue to shape--the conditions and events of human life, thought, violence, sociability, and art. Studying selected works from this cross-section of twentieth century literature alongside essays by Heidegger, Mumford, McLuhan, Benjamin, Kittler, Woolf, and others, we'll think about the force of technology in the interlocking relationships between war, empire, social struggle, and everyday life as we hone skills as imaginative, resourceful readers and thinkers through exercises in research and interpretation.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area