MODULE THREE: LATE MODERNISM (c.1925 - c. 1945)

WEEK 9: ELIOT II: THE WASTELAND

Required Readings:

Seminar 1: The Waste Land [1922]: 

• Section II: "A Game of Chess" 
• Section III: "The Fire Sermon"

• Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy
• T. S. Eliot "From Notes Towards the Definition of Culture" (in Frank Kermode, ed. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot)
• T. S. Eliot "Ulysses, Order and Myth" (in Frank Kermode, ed. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot)
• James Frazer The Golden Bough

WEEK 10: ELIOT III: THE WASTE LAND CONTINUED / LATE RELIGIOUS POETRY

Required Readings:

Seminar 2:

• Ash Wednesday
• Ariel Poems: "Journey of the Magi"
• The Four Quartets: "The Dry Salvages"

• T. S. Eliot "Religion and Literature" (in Frank Kermode, ed. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot)
• T. S. Eliot "From The Idea of a Christian Society" (in Frank Kermode, ed. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot)

Seminar 2: the Poetry of Dylan Thomas "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" / "The Hand That Signed the Paper" / "After the Funeral" / "The Hunchback in the Park" / "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" / "Fern Hill" / "In my Craft and Sullen Art" / "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"

Recommended Readings:

• W. H. Auden The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
• W. H. Auden "Squares and Oblongs" (see extract entitled "Poetry as a Game of Knowledge" in Richard Ellman, ed. The Modern Tradition)
• W. H. Auden "Making, Knowing and Judging" (see extract entitled "Poetry as Rite" in Richard Ellman, ed. The Modern Tradition)

• Ronald Carter, ed. Thirties Poets: ‘The Auden Group' (Casebook Series)
• David Perkins A History of Modern Poetry (Vol. II):
  • "The Period Style of the 1930s in England" (Ch. 6)
  • "W. H. Auden" (Ch. 8)
  • "The English Romantic Revival, 1934-1945" (Ch. 9)

Seminar 1: the Poetry of Claude McKay and Countee Cullen

• Claude McKay "If We Must Die" / "To the White Fiends" / "Africa" / "America" / "My Mother" / "Enslaved" / "The White House" / "Outcast" (in Gates, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature)

• Countee Cullen "Yet Do I Marvel" / "Tableau" / "Incident" / "Saturday's Child" / "Heritage" / "To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time" / "From the Dark Tower"

Seminar 2: the Poetry of Langston Hughes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" / "Danse Africaine" / "Jazzonia" / "Dream Variations" / "The Wary Blues" / "I, Too" / "Homesick Blues" / "Po' Boy Blues" / "Gypsy Man" / "Lament Over Love" / "Song for a Dark Girl" / "Gal's Cry for a Dying Lover" / "Hard Daddy" / "Ballad of the Landlord" / "Dream Boogie" / "Harlem"

Recommended Readings:

• W. E. B. Du Bois "Criteria of Negro Art" (in Vincent Leitch, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism)

• W. E. B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk:

  • "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (in David Levering Lewis, ed. W. E. B. Du Bois: a Reader)

  • "The Concept of Race" (in David Levering Lewis, ed. W. E. B. Du Bois: a Reader)

• Marcus Garvey "Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World" (in Van Deburg, ed. Modern Black Nationalism)

• Langston Hughes "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (in Henry Louis Gates, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; also in Vincent Leitch, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism)

• Alain Locke "The New Negro" (in Henry Louis Gates, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; also in Vincent Leitch, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism)

WHAT IS MODERNISM?  A SUMMARY

• Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism:
  • Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane "The Name and Nature of Modernism"
  • Alan Bullock "The Double Image"
  • James McFarlane "The Mind of Modernism"
  • Graham Hough "The Modernist Lyric"
  • Richard Sheppard "The Crisis of Language"
  • G. M. Hyde "The Poetry of the City"
  • Clive Scott "The Prose Poem and Free Verse"
  • Ellman Crasnow "Poems and Fictions: Stevens, Rilke, Valéry
  • Natan Zach "Imagism and Vorticism"
• David Perkins A History of Modern Poetry (Vol. II): "Reappraising the Modernists" (Ch. 9)