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Summer Course! Trent in Oshawa!
Modern Fiction
ENGL2807H
Instructor: Sara Humphreys
Office Hours: TBA
Office Location: 157
Email: sarahumphreys@trentu.ca
Course Length and Time: Tuesdays and Thursday from 1pm to 4pm May 10 th
– June 16th
Course Calendar Description:
This course examines the development of modern fiction from the flourishing of experimental Modernism in the 1920s to contemporary voices and trends. The texts will be interpreted from a social and historical perspective and a formal or aesthetic perspective.
Course Description:
This course examines the development of fiction and non-fiction prose in twentiethcentury western culture. We will focus on the various movements and literary experiments that comprised modernism. We will study mainstream works, such as F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , along with experimental works, such as Gertrude
Stein’s “word portraits.” Not only will we read literature from the period, but we will also engage with the critical debates over art, literature, and social justice that raged throughout the early to mid-twentieth century. While the main mantra of the modernist period is often touted as “make it new,” an equally important and defining sound bite is
“art can save the world.” We will sample the many works that weighed in on how to write and read fiction in a world plagued by economic depression, technological change, mass violence, and social upheaval. In addition, we will study how modernist movements, such as futurism, shaped our contemporary period. From graphic novels to film, modernist authors and artists helped to usher in the literary forms and conventions that we now take for granted. Contemporary authors such as Art Spiegelman expanded upon the modernist idea that art can save the world and created works that truly have changed the literary landscape. By the end of the course, you will be able to locate, identify, and appreciate the modernist influences that have shaped our postmodern world.
Required Reading
Virginia Woolf “Modern Fiction,” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown” (e-reserve)
T.S. Eliot “Tradition and Individual Talent” (e-reserve)
Gertrude Stein “A Description of the Fifteenth of November: A Portrait of T.S. Eliot.” (ereserve)
Lawrence Rainey “Introduction” in Modernism: An Anthology (e-reserve)
Jean Paul Sartre “What is Literature?” (e-reserve)
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (bookstore)
F.T. Marinetti “The Manifesto of Futurism” (e-reserve)

Tristan Tzara “Dada Manifesto 1918” (e-reserve)
Andre Breton “Manifesto of Surrealism.” (e-reserve)
Elizabeth Bowen “Attractive Modern Homes” (e-reserve)
Jean Toomer selections from Cane (e-reserve)
Art Spiegelman Maus (bookstore)
Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize speech (online)
Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (film to be shown in class)
Digital fiction (TBA)
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