As requested, some suggestions for further reading. To limit the illimitable field of “cool stuff to read related to modernism,” I’ll stick to a few headings:

cutting room floor:

Here are some classics that didn’t fit for various reasons:

• Ulysses: you’ve heard me talk about it ad nauseam. Joyce’s work is endlessly fascinating, from Dubliners to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Finnegan’s Wake, but it’s Ulysses that immediately struck readers as shattering the boundaries of the novel in 1922 and still gobsmacks readers with its range, allusiveness, humor, and fidelity, in a way, to Homer.
• Heart of Darkness: Conrad is exemplary (and/or notorious) for so many reasons: he’s a Polish man who wrote in French and English; his novels pushed the boundaries of the realist novel in its “early” stages; and his representations of colonialism have been a touchstone–often with seething rage and biting humor–for postcolonial writers seeking to claim their individual and collective stories from colonialist oppressors.
• In Our Time: Hemingway has become something of a cliché to us, but IOT is a phenomenal example of the modernist “story cycle” (like Cane, Winesburg, Ohio, and Go Down, Moses), one that intersperses masterful short stories of post-WWI life with fragments from the War, conveying a sense of trauma and fragmentation on the page.
• The Making of Americans: Gertrude Stein’s tome that radically reinvents the novel form in a massive tome that tells the story, sort of, of two American families but that, more profoundly, mediates on narration itself, on the pleasures and modes of being that writing can bring about. As Stein puts it herself:

and so then I will go on writing, and not for myself and for any other one but because it is a thing I certainly can be earnestly doing with sometimes excited feeling and sometimes happy feeling and sometimes longing feeling and sometimes almost indifferent feeling and always with a little dubious feeling.

• Nightwood: Djuna Barnes’s novel that’s part of Ty Miller’s “late modernism” and has become a classic in “queer studies.”
• Cane: Jean Toomer’s strange and wonderful novel-like text from the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movement migrates through genres (poetry, song lyrics, narrative prose), regions (rural Georgia, NYC, DC, and back to GA), and registers (vernacular Southern speech, fragmentary stream-of-consciousness).

If you liked James, you’ll love…

• more James: the novels typical of James’s “late style” are often cited as a point of origin for modernism in the novel. The Ambassadors is James’s masterpiece, for my money, a novel obsessed with## migration, boundaries of all kinds, from aesthetic to erotic to moral to geographical, and above all with representation itself, in a rich instance of modernist self-reflexiveness. Also might dip into The Golden Bowl or experimental prose writing like the marvelous and challenging The American Scene, which features some of the best writing about turn-of-the-century NYC in existence.
• Edith Wharton’s work extends the Jamesian inheritance in many ways: not as formally experimental, but at least as invested in exploring the New Woman and other faces of modernity in ways that recall Masie. Check out Age of Innocence or Custom of the Country: the latter is the closest kin to Masie in terms of theme.

Woolf? Who’s afraid?!

• I think here the only answer is more Woolf: The Waves is the most deliriously experimental, interlacing the free indirect discourse of six narrators over an entire lifecourse. The beginning is one of the most daring depictions of childhood consciousness I know in ways that will remind you of Faulkner.
• To the Lighthouse is also splendid and probably the most like Dalloway in terms of perspective: also focused on a matron of high social station around the time of the Great War. I’ve thought about its representation of the “pause” of all normal social life during the War many times during the pandemic!
• Woolf’s prose writings are also wonderful: like T. S Eliot and Ezra Pound and others, she was a “double threat,” as deft a critic as she was a novelist. The compilation Genius and Ink is a good place to start.

Faulkner

• Where to start? For many critics, the “big five” are The Sound and the Fury, AILD, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. You could do worse than attack them in that order: TSAF is as good an exemplar of modernist prose as Ulysses or Dalloway. Beginning with LIA Faulkner turns to themes of race and Southern history with a vengeance: AA! is one of the most profound explorations of the slave system I know. And pick up Edouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi as your guide: if there’s one book I most wish I’d written, that’s probably it.

McKay

• Banjo is part of a trilogy of related novels of vagabondage around the “Black Atlantic”: the others are Home to Harlem and Banana Bottom. I’m interested, as I mentioned in class, in the linkages between McKay and the “bottom dogs” tradition associated with Edward Dahlberg: you might check out his Bottom Dogs and From Flushing to Cavalry, books fascinated with the unproductive and sordid side of life in ways that anticipate some of the themes of the Beats, for whom Dahlberg was something of an elder statesman.

West

• West wrote two other slim novels: The Dream Life of Balso Snell was written when West was an undergraduate and is basically an extended poop joke joined with mock-classical tropes and the setting of the Trojan Horse story. A Cool Million is West’s send-up of Horatio Alger’s novels: subtitled “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,” it narrates the (literal) disassembly of an “average Joe” amid the nascent home-grown fascism of 1930s US culture. Sound timely? It is!

There’s more where that came from, of course, and it’s biased towards the US side of the puddle, but that should keep you all busy for a while! Have a great summer and keep in touch!

• I’ll cover this in class today, but here’s the link for your final paper submission:
  • https://www.dropbox.com/request/n3opIqQT5MoObki72ODq
  • due Thursday 5/20 at midnight- one letter grade penalty for every day it’s late
  • please submit in an editable form (.docx, .pages .rtf) rather than .pdf if possible

I hope you enjoyed the research-based session with Prof. Newman from the Library on Monday. She has provided us with a useful “cheat sheet” on how to conduct literary research. There’s also a link on the assignment page, FYI.

Just wanted to point out that the “pot is light” as they say in poker circles. Please submit your posts ASAP, unless you’re taking your skip.

On another note, Elizaveta speculated on the title in her excellent post. I should have covered this so wanted to do so now. The title comes from Homer’s ODYSSEY, when Odysseus travels to the underworld and meets his comrade Agamemnon, who has been murdered and his body disrespected by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover. The title would seem to speak to proprieties around death and dying and their violations, in ways that become increasingly clear in the novel!

I’ll also mention that, like Joyce’s Ulysses, Faulkner’s novel might be seen as a modernist take on the epic, with life and death and love and betrayal, with a perilous journey in which nature itself seems pitted against the heroes. But of course in modernist fashion, the realism and earnestness of the narrative mode is undercut in all kinds of ways…

My syllabus somewhat cheekily calls the section we’re currently working through “peak modernism,” playing a bit with our tendency to reduce the messiness of literary and cultural history into neat arcs. Joan Stamler shared with me this piece from the NYT** that argues in a similar vein that 1925 was the peak:

This is perhaps “inside baseball,” but 1922 is more common as the “peak,” since Eliot’s “The Waste-Land” and Joyce’s Ulysses appeared then. Michael North has published an amazing book to that effect called Reading 1922. At any rate, the piece has a nice reading of Dalloway and includes a riff on “Modern Fiction” as well. Plus some stuff, like Hemingway’s In Our Time and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, that fell out of our course, regrettably!

**All Hunter students can get free NYT access through the library, so use it!!!!

We’ll be reading Faulkner’s weird and wonderful As I Lay Dying next. A couple of things:

• study questions are up for the entire novel. I’ve divided them into arbitary 50-page units that don’t track our syllabus, so take note.
• for a deeper dive, take a look at Yoknapedia, a resource I’ve built from student-submitted articles of all lengths on all topics pertinent to Faulkner. What does “pussel-gutted” mean? It’s in there. A fabulous reading of the figure of the “gourd” in AILD by our own Florencia Ledesma? It’s in there. Equally fascinating readings of “keening” by Christina Fox and “female dope” by Eileen Medina? They are in there.
• Here’s a page of all the entries tagged AILD for As I Lay Dying. Spoiler alert: there be spoilers.

To repeat what I emailed to everyone, here are the instructions for the midterm:

• As promised, the midterm template is here via Dropbox link
• no Zoom tomorrow; see you Thursday, when we’ll kick off our discussion of Faulkner
• due Tuesday at 5pm via Dropbox link: let me know if any tech issues come up and email it to me as a last resort
• please reach out to me with any questions or concerns
• note that there is choice for both the short answers and the essay: please read instructions and don’t answer everything!

Eileen helpfully pointed out that I did this whole riff on “biopower” or “bio-politics” without explaining what it was. As you may remember, the context was Mrs. Bruton’s deep identification with the imperial project of encouraging the migration of young Britons to Canada. This urge, aligning herself with the Empire’s power to manage entire populations of people, keep demographic statistics, worry over how to manage inflows and outflows of different kinds of people across borders, is a paradigmatic example of what the cultural theorist Michel Foucault calls “bio-power” or “biopolitics.”

For Foucault, this modality of power manifests in the nineteenth century in an intensification of the “disciplinary” model he traces in Discipline and Punish, his study of 18thC technologies of surveillance and incarceration. Bio-power focuses outward in scale, onto entire populations at the national and international level, and inward in intensification, aiming at the biological functions of nutrition and sexuality (e.g., birth control policy, anti-obesity efforts).

For more, check out this essay by Rachel Adams, this article from Wikipedia, and, if you want the horse’s mouth, the .pdf of the final chapter of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, where he introduces the term for the first time, which I’ve put in our Dropbox under “general sources.”