Littératures

The scenes of American modernism (1916-1935)

One hundred years ago, American literature was profoundly transformed with the advent of modernism, which can variously be seen as a movement, a period, or a series of breaks with former ways of thinking about and representing the world.

In this course, we will consider the diverse manifestations of American modernism across a variety of genres (drama, autobiography, fiction) and venues (including the “Little Theatre” and the “little magazine”). We will also reflect on how the currents of expatriation, impelled by political imperatives, economic prosperity and/or bohemian wanderlust, determined the international trajectories of American modernists across the Atlantic. Finally, part of our study will focus on the role played by women and African American writers in challenging the social and ideological orthodoxies embedded in literature. We will thus seek, overall, to read the literary innovations of American modernism against the tumultuous historical background of the first decades of the 20^th century.

- Acquérir des connaissances sur l’avant-garde littéraire américaine au début du XXe siècle

- Articuler l’étude des textes sur l’analyse d’un mouvement culturel et de ses fondements politiques et sociaux

- Acquérir les concepts critiques et théoriques propres à l’étude du modernisme

- Développer ses capacités de présentation à l’oral

-Apprendre à travailler en groupe

Contrôle de session 1
Une épreuve écrite sur table de 3h (commentaire d'un texte extrait d’une des œuvres au programme)
Examen de session 2
Une épreuve écrite sur table de 3h (commentaire d'un texte extrait d’une des œuvres au programme)

Français C1/ Anglais C1

We will begin by looking at modernist magazines, as digitized on the Modernist Journals Project database (https://modjourn.org/), then study the following texts:

- Susan Glaspell, Trifles (1916), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10623/10623-h/10623-h.htm#TRIFLES

-Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), New York, Vintage Books

-Ernest Hemingway, in our time (1924 version), http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Hemingway-in-our-time-1924.pdf

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Babylon Revisited” (1931), http://gutenberg.net.au/fsf/BABYLON-REVISITED.html

- Claude McKay, Romance in Marseille (written c. 1933), London, Penguin.