Special Studies in Modernism: Modernist Life Writings

The course attempts at once to isolate the distinctive character of modernist life writings and locate them within a specific cluster of psychological concerns and historical/social/cultural preoccupations. We explore how our writers/biographers defined their relation to their familial as well as cultural past; how they devised untraditional and singular forms to represent their own experience or those of their chosen subjects; how they shouldered their burdens as self-chroniclers or historians of loss, especially of self-loss.