Littératures : The scenes of American modernism (1913-1933)

Séminaire Master 1 & 2: The scenes of American modernism (1913-1933).

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, poetry, fiction, autobiography), places (New York, London, Paris,
Marseille, etc.) 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 modernist writers. 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 social and historical background of the first decades of the 20th 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

SESSION 1 :

- Contrôle continu : un exposé oral et une épreuve terminale écrite sur table de 2 h (commentaire de texte ou dissertation).

- Contrôle dérogatoire : une épreuve écrite sur table de 3h (dissertation ou commentaire d'un texte extrait d’une des œuvres au programme).

SESSION 2:

Une épreuve écrite sur table de 3h (dissertation ou commentaire d'un
texte extrait d’une des oeuvres au programme)

anglais C1, français 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
- Ernest Hemingway, in our time (1924 version), http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/wpcontent/
uploads/2015/07/Hemingway-in-our-time-1924.pdf + stories « Indian Summer »,
« Big Two-Hearted River » (1925), « Today Is Friday » (1926), « The Killers » (1927) –
see PDF file in CEL
- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), https://poets.org/poem/waste-land
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Babylon Revisited” (1931), http://gutenberg.net.au/fsf/BABYLONREVISITED.
html
- Claude McKay, “Sonnets and Songs” in The Liberator, July 1919 (see PDF) ; Romance
in Marseille (written c. 1933), London, Penguin, 2020.
Complementary reading:
- Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), New York, Vintage Books.