ENGL 4022 Modern European Novel

A course on major European novelists of the early twentieth century: Proust, Gide, Musil, Rilke, Mann, Kafka, Pessoa. We will read modernist theory and ask: What is modernism? What is modernist temporality? How is interiority reflected? We will put modernist writers into relation with philosophy developing during this period (e.g., Heidegger, Benjamin) as well as with contemporary theory (Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis), responding in particular to Badiou's sense of modern art in <i>The Century.</i> Does modernism's passion for the Real express itself through formalizations pointing to cracks in the Symbolic or in a less circuitous manner? A mid-term and final paper.