Instructor: Prof. Laura Winkiel
Modernism was born in the little magazines. Though modernism may not have invented this form, it certainly perfected it. Cheap to publish, collective, multi-generic, multi-medial and interspersed with ads, editorials, and readers' letters, the little magazine has been largely eclipsed in the digital age. However, digital media allows us wide access to this lost art form. This class will investigate modernism, a political, cultural, literary and arts movement of the early to mid twentieth-century that fundamentally transformed life and literature from staid conformism to something rife with provocation and newness, as seen through its little magazines. While we will certainly read some of the most well-known authors of the period: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, we’ll also investigate how these and other writers got many of their ideas in early twentieth-century salons, cafes, museums, and city streets and also depended on editors, publishers, critics and collaborators for helping them get published. We’ll pair the “great” works with their circulation in little magazines to get a fuller sense of the publishing and public worlds in which they appeared. These magazines are available digitally and in the Norlin Library’s special collections.
Requirements: This course emphasizes the making of modernism and, hence, our class will also emphasize action: doing, reading, discovering, surveying, mapping. You will complete a reading report of a modernist journal, a periodical survey, a presentation and a final project that consists of learning in depth about a particular aspect of modernism.
Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Requires prerequisite courses of ENGL 2102 and ENGL 2112 (all minimum grade C-). Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) English (ENGL) or Humnanities (HUMN) majors and minors only.
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Critical Studies in English