ETS 412 Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett

UC Spring 2000 Thurs. 7-10

Instructor: Sanford Sternlicht Office 429HL 3-9480/2173

Office hours: Tues. 10-11:30 and by appointment. svsternl@syr,edu

Home phone: 472-5639. Fax 315 443 3660 Mailbox 401HL

Modernism was the cultural revolution of the twentieth century. It was (is) a crucial economic, political, and cultural dynamic with an impact comparable to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, or Romanticism. It produced implemented Marxism, Fascism, and late capitalism. It suffered through two world wars, the Great Depression, and the advent of the cold war.

This course will explore the history, development, and fate of Modernism, with its anti-Victorian, non-historical, non-narrative, self-referential, synchronic, microcosmic, relativistic ways of thinking and textual production, as manifested in the works of three great Irish writers: William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. We will begin with cultural discourse, definitions, and parameters, and then proceed to read and locate in culture and the geographical nexus of place and time poetry and plays by Yeats, novels by Joyce, and Beckett's dramatic masterpiece, Waiting for Godot.

Texts: W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays.(Rosenthal)

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Films shown: James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Samuel Beckett, and "Waiting for Godot.

Requirements: Four 3 page critical/research papers. A strict attendance policy will be enforced. Students with more than three unexcused absences will have a grade reduced one full letter: e.g.: A to B; students with 5 unexcused absences will receive an F for the course regardless of work done. Students are expected to read all assignments and be prepared for class discussion every class.

Students with special needs are asked to identify themselves at the end of their first class.

Yeats Assignments:

Intro: xix-xliv

Poems: "When You Are Old," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Adam's Curse," "No Second Troy," All Things Can Tempt Me," "Fallen Majesty," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," "On Being Asked for a War Poem," "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," "A Prayer for My Daughter," "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Tower," "Meditations in Time of Civil War," "Leda and the Swan," "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz," "Coole and Ballylee," "For Anne Gregory," "Byzantium," "Remorse for Intemperate Speech," "Crazy Jane and the Bishop," Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment," "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop," "A Last Confession," "The Gyres," "The Spur," "The Municipal Gallery Revisited," "Why Should Not Old Men Be Made," "Crazy Jane on the Mountain," "Under Ben Bulben," "Man and the Echo."

Play: "Purgatory"

Also, Reader's Guide to Modern Irish Drama: 8-11, 12-14, 19-26, 46-54, 60-61.