“Wastelands and Cityscapes” is the framing sub-title for this seminar. The seminar focuses on three modernist writers and three of their poems that present poetic visions of London and Paris within different early 20th century contexts: Hope Mirrlees’ “Paris” (1919/20), T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (1921), and Edith Sitwell’s “Gold Coast Customs” (1929).
These long poems share what are generally considered “modernist” poetic features: they are formally experimental poems, they are full of fragmented, disparate sounds and voices, and they amalgamate references to a wide historical, literary and cultural context into their visions of contemporary European cities. Mirrlees’ “Paris” seems to embrace the recovering city, Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and Sitwell’s “Gold Coast Customs” present rather bleak pictures of the contemporary world.
The combination of the poems by Hope Mirrlees and Edith Sitwell with T.S. Eliot’s “ur-poem of modernism” (Gyllian Phillips) balances Eliot’s canonical status from a gendered perspective. Sitwell’s “Gold Coast Customs”, furthermore, opens up the discussion about modernism’s conflicted relationship with imperialist discourse.
In this class, we will read these three poems with a close eye to their modernist poetics as well as within the contexts of e.g. the modern urban experience, early 20th century European and colonial history, the relation of high and popular cultures.
The poems’ texts as well as additional critical material will be available on moodle at the beginning of the semester. A preparatory reading of texts by these three modernist poets is highly recommended.
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