Seminar Description
Spring 2011
Professor Susan McCabe
English 620 (32796D)
4:30 to 6:50
“A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a
really good saint does nothing and so I wanted to have Four Saints that did nothing and I
wrote the Four Saints in Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally
speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.” –Stein, as written
to Carl Van Vechten
Three Modernists: Poetry. Plays. Cinema.
We will examine three modernists in some depth: Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Samuel
Beckett. How do their forays in drama, opera and cinema shape these divergent moderns?
In what does each poet engage with and reconcile dramatic material with the lyric? The
material for the class will encompass some of Stein's Portraits, Tender Buttons, her Lectures in
America, Stanzas in Meditation, her Late Plays & Operas; we will also take into account her
fascination with detective fiction and Charlie Chaplin. At the same time, Stein's ideal was to
write about “nothing”: was her Four Saints in Three Acts a complete refashioning of each
genre: drama, music, poetry? With Eliot (like Stein, he wrote some “film scenarios” and was
drawn to melodrama), we will traverse the low and the high in his early poetry, The Waste
Land (montage composed of many fragments culled from Elizabethan and Jacobean plays as
well as ragtime), Four Quartets as well as his existential play Cocktail Party; we will read
Beckett's early poetry, Waiting for Godot, Watt, and his Film (1965) with Buster Keaton. We
will particularly examine how drama or cinema changes along with modernist poetry, shifting
the very character of consciousness and how it can be re-examined within highly
experimental dialogic or multivocal enactments. Along with primary texts and visual
materials, you will be expected to read major critical work on each figure.
Students will give weekly reports, and several short papers along with a final longer one.
The reading list and syllabus will be available by the end of November.
Required Texts
Eliot, T.S. Complete Pomes & Plays
Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (Mariner/ Houghton Mifflin Books)
Stein, Gertrude. Blood on the Dining Room Floor
Stein, Gertrude. Library of America Volume 1 1903-1932.
Stein, Gertrude. Library of America Volume II 1932-46.
Middleton, Thomas. Women Beware Women (Oxford University Press)
Beckett, Samuel. I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader (Grove)
Beckett, Samuel. Watt (Grove)
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Schedule of Readings
Week One
January 13
Introductions:
[fascination with personas]
Early Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; “Portrait of a Lady”; “Gerontion”; “Mr.
Apollinax”; “Hysteria” [Complete Poems]
“Hamlet & His Problems” (1919); “Tradition & Individual Talent” (1921); “Poetry & Drama”
(1951) [Selected Prose]
[Perloff: “Avant-Garde Eliot” in 21st Century Modernism}
Week Two
January 20
Early Stein [fascination with portraits and breaking perspective]
Q.E D.;
“Picasso”; “Ada”; “Matisse””; “Idem the Same. A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”; “Susie Asado”:
“Miss Furr & Miss. Skeene”: “In the Grass”; “Sacred Emily”; “If I Told Him”; “Movie” (Vol. 1)
“Composition as Explanation” (Vol. 1)
[Chapters 1 and 2 of Ulla Dydo’s The Language that Rises;
[Perloff’s “Gertrude Stein’s Differential Syntax” in 21st Century Modernism; McCabe’s “Delight in
Dislocation” in Cinematic Modernism]
Week Three
January 27
Stein
[the fascination with comedy and Chaplin]
Tender Buttons
Lifting Belly (Vol. 1)
Week Four
February 3
Eliot
[the fascination with melodrama]
The Waste Land (1922)
[From Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism; McCabe, “Eliot and the Masculinity Problem” (Chapter Two
in Cinematic Modernism)
Week Five
February 10
[the fascination with the Jacobean]
The Waste Land continued
Middleton, Women Beware Women & A Game of Chess
[if time, reread The Tempest, Hamlet]
-3Week Six
February 17
Mid-Stein [the fascination with saints]
Patriarchal Poetry
Four Saints in Three Acts I (1927)
“Virgil Tompson” (Vol. 1)
[Dydo, chapter 4]
Week Seven
February 24
Mid-Stein
[the fascination with detection]
Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1933)
“Is Dead”; “A Waterfall and a Piano” (handouts)
“Why I Like Detective Stories” (1937); “American Crimes and How they Matter” 1935) (handout)
Week Eight
March 3
Mid-Stein
“Henry James”; Lectures in America; Narration (Lecture 3); “What Does She See When She Shuts Her
Eyes” [Vol. 2]
Week Nine
March 10
Mid-Stein
An Acquaintance With Description (1926); Stanzas in Meditation (1932) [Vol 2]
Dydo, 487-532 on Stanzas
PROPOSALS DUE: one page abstract maximum with attached bibliography
Week Ten SPRING BREAK
Eleven
March 24
[the fascination with gallows]
Beckett early poems: Whoroscope (1930); from Echoes Bones; and from Murphy [Beckett Reader]
Freud on comedy; slapstick comedians (Laurel and Hardy; Mark Brothers; Buster Keaton)
Week Twelve
March 31
{the fascination with redemption]
Later Eliot
Four Quartets (1943)
Murder in the Cathedral (play; 1935)
Week Thirteen
April 7
Beckett, Waiting for Godot (play; 1948-9)
Week Fourteen
April 14
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Eliot, The Cocktail Party (play; 1949)
Week Fifteen
April 21
[the fascination with evasion/resistance]
Beckett, Watt (1953)
“Witt-Watt The Language of Resistance/ The Resistance of Language” in Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s
Ladder
Week Sixteen
April 28
Beckett, Film; Not I; Cascndo (The Reader)
Stein, Yes is for a Very Young Man (play; 1946)
Grading/ Requirements:
--Students will be graded on their conscientious participation and attendance (no one missing more
than two classes can hope to receive an excellent grade); this class will have a number of occasions
where we simply read aloud (especially the plays); you must be prepared to contribute to class
discussions
20%
--Students will also be graded on their role as discussion leaders in the semester
20%
{During the first week, each student will choose a week to address a particular question/critical
problem raised by the readings, and to lead the class through an existing critical approach to the
material (these reports should be no more than 20 minutes and accompanied by a summary/class
guide).
--Weekly writing responses (excepting the day you lead discussion) that address the intersection of
drama/or other media with poetry and involve a close reading of a particular passage that either
illuminates or challenges or troubles such an approach
20%
--Final Creative or Critical Project (the first could be a short play, film, set of poems that address a
particular philosophical or genre question); for both a proposal, and bibliography (no more than one
page is due March 31; Final Project due May 5th and should not exceed 20 pages or a sensible
equivalent thereof
40%
IMPORTANT REMINDERS
All short one-page responses should be printed out and submitted to me in class in a 12 font,
double-spaced format and all students should receive copies of the work of their peers on
email prior to class meeting.
Students should do their best to purchase the editions that I have requested so that we can
easily read the same copy of a text with the same page numbers. These books in most cases
should not be “virtual” texts.
Some critical material has been assigned in the syllabus, but expect further suggestions or
assignments; these critical pieces will either be on reserve, or made available to you as a
xerox or as a scanned copy.
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Statement for Students with Disabilities
Any student requesting academic accommodations based on a disability is required to register with
Disability Services and Programs (DSP) each semester. A letter of verification for approved
accommodations can be obtained from DSP. Please be sure the letter is delivered to me (or to TA) as
early in the semester as possible. DSP is located in STU 301 and is open 8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m.,
Monday through Friday. The phone number for DSP is (213) 740-0776.
Statement on Academic Integrity
USC seeks to maintain an optimal learning environment. General principles of academic honesty
include the concept of respect for the intellectual property of others, the expectation that individual
work will be submitted unless otherwise allowed by an instructor, and the obligations both to protect
one’s own academic work from misuse by others as well as to avoid using another’s work as one’s
own. All students are expected to understand and abide by these principles. SCampus, the Student
Guidebook, contains the Student Conduct Code in Section 11.00, while the recommended sanctions
are located in Appendix A: http://www.usc.edu/dept/publications/SCAMPUS/gov/. Students will
be referred to the Office of Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards for further review,
should there be any suspicion of academic dishonesty. The Review process can be found at:
http://www.usc.edu/student-affairs/SJACS/