English 598:50/F 2007                                                                Class Meetings: W 4:30-7:15/ED-113

Office Hours:  T   1:00-2:15  p.m.                                                                    Office phone: 571-3622

                        W  7:30-8:30 p.m.                                                     e-mail: kbluemel@monmouth.edu

                        R   9:00-10:00 p.m. electronic                                Office: Wilson Annex 509

                        F   1:00-2:15 p.m.

                        and by appointment                                                            

Required texts:

Patrick Deane, ed., History in Our Hands: A Critical Anthology (Leicester UP)

Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Berkeley)

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Hachette/LB)

Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (New Directions)

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harvest)

Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (Burford)

Phyllis Bottome, The Mortal Storm (Northwestern UP)

Olivia Manning, The School for Love (Arrow UK, etc.)

Course description and objectives:  

Intermodernism as defined and explored in this course is the British prose literature created during the interwar and war years (roughly, the late 1920s through late 1940s) by writers who were not identified with modernism, the prestige literary movement of their culture. Despite the inevitable reference to dates in the foregoing description, intermodernism, like modernism and postmodernism, is best thought of as a kind of writing, discourse, or orientation rather than a period that competes with others for particular years or texts or personalities. One major goal of the class is to investigate the possibilities, contours, and limitations of this kind of writing in order to enrich our understanding of British twentieth-century literary culture and critical accounts about it.

A term I introduced into critical discourse in 2004, “intermodernism” assumes that certain non-modernist texts of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s can be read to best advantage as cultural products of a single intermodernist movement rather than as products of distinct decades (The Thirties, The Forties). This course will introduce you to exemplary intermodern narratives, focusing on textual forms and the ways reception of these forms has been influenced by historical and political contexts. A second major goal of the class is to see how formal analysis prepares the way for theoretical discussion about canon formation and periodization, genre, style, gender, and cultural institutions.

Organizing our study around such a new critical concept means that we will be inventing intermodernism as we go. This leads to the most important objective of the course: to provide you with opportunities to make genuine contributions to scholarship on mid-twentieth-century British literature. More specifically, by the end of this course you should be able to answer with confidence the following questions: What is intermodernism? Who are the intermodernists? Who are the contemporary figures that read it, publicized it, criticized it? What are the historical/cultural conditions that shaped intermodernism? Did intermodernism have the power to shape the extraordinary historical, social, and cultural events of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s? What is the potential for intermodernism to reshape 21^st-century literary-critical discourse? What might we gain if it did?

See Syllabus 598:50 and Policies and Guidelines

Specific class requirements and grading:

Class Participation (15%)

Oral Presentation (20%)

First short paper (5 pages) (15%)

Second short paper (7 pages) (20%)

Final paper (15-17 pages) (30%)

All class requirements will be graded on a ten-point scale in which A=100-90, B=89-80, C=79-70, D=69-60, F=59-0.  Within this scale, "plus" or "minus" grades correspond to the following example: B+=89-87, B=86-84, B-=83-80.