EN 9B2

This module focuses on three of the most acclaimed Modernist writers, comparing some of their work to focus on alternative approaches to traditional understandings of Modernism and Modernity. At its base is the notion that key concerns of Modernism are still of vital importance for the present. Notions of a core and peripheral Modernism will be problematized, reflecting on Fredric Jameson's "Singular Modernity". Special attention will be devoted to comparing and relating each author's exploration of fragmentation, dreaming and failure as key concepts in the framework of modernity. The division between Anglo-American and European Modernism will be explicitly questioned by referencing the authors read with the work of Beckett, Joyce and Woolf. At the same time the module will also explore how the work of Walter Benjamin, both creatively as well as theoretically, illuminates and complicates these issues.

Outline Syllabus:

Week 1: Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet

Week 2: Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet

Week 3: Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet; Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project

Week 4: Franz Kafka. Collected Stories

Week 5: Franz Kafka. Collected Stories

Week 6: Franz Kafka. Collected Stories; Walter Benjamin. Illuminations

Week 7: Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's

Week 8: Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Week 9: Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time; Walter Benjamin. Illuminations

Week 10: Walter Benjamin. One-Way Street

Selected Bibliography:

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Transl. Richard Zenith (2002).

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Transl. Michael Hofmann (2007)

Franz Kafka, Selected Stories, Transl. Stanley Corngold (2006)

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1, Transl. Lydia Davis (2003)

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2, Transl. James Grieve (2003)

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Transl. Harry Zohn (1968)

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (2002)

Walter Benjamin, One-way Street, Transl. J. A. Underwood (2009) ---

Hannah Arendt, "Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940" in Illuminations, 1-58, (1968)

Theodor Adorno, "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin" in Prisms, 227-242 (1983)

Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (2004)

Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (1997)

Andrew Benjamin, The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (1991)

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, (1989)

Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (2006)

Stanley Corngold and Ruth V. Gross, Eds., Kafka for the Twenty-First Century (2011)

Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (1972)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature (1986)

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1994)

Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro, Eds. Portuguese Modernisms: Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts (2010)

Carol Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography (2007)

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2013)

Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (2007)

Anna Klobucka and Mark Sabine, Eds. Embodying Pessoa (2007)

Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1988)

Michael Levenson, Modernism (2011)

Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust (2004)

Jerome Boyd Maunsell, "The Hauntings of Fernando Pessoa", Modernism/modernity 19 (2012)

Gerhard Neumann, Franz Kafka: Experte der Macht (2012)

Cristopher Prendergast, Mirages and Bad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (2013)

Maria I. Ramalho, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa's Turn in anglo-American Modernism (2002)

Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren (2011)

Darlene J. Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship (2009)

Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (2009)

Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993)

Joseph Vogl, On Tarrying (2011)

Samuel Weber, Benjamin's -abilities (2008)

Tutor: Paulo de Medeiros

Thursdays 16:00-18:00

H543