This course explores major themes in European modernism. Class discussions focus on the following themes: the preoccupation with historicity; the mobilization of anachronistic structures and ghostly temporalities by the avant-garde; the ethics of forgetting and encyclopaedic form. Authors included in the syllabus are T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Pirandello. (Offered at the University of Perugia)

1. Introduction: Overview and aims of the Course
2. Modernism: Tradition and Historicity 
   1. Reading:
      • T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”;
      • Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity”
3. T.S. Eliot: the demands of tradition

• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• The Waste Land
• Little Gidding
  1. Supplementary materials:
     • T.S. Eliot, Dante (the essay)

1. Haunted Historicity: Ghostly Modernisms

• The Spiritualist Temptations of Modernism (Pirandello’s Mattia Pascal)
• Joseph Conrad and the madness of the time: The Secret Agent
• Joyce’s ghostly temporalities (Ulysses IX; Finnegans Wake I.7 [excerpt from the Haunted Inkbottle])
  1. Supplementary materials:
     • Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism

1. Revisions of courtly love, or the love song of J. Augusta Joyce

• Giacomo Joyce
• Finnegans Wake II.4
  1. Supplementary materials:
     • Excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist

Course site at UniPg