Instructor Philip Geheber Department of English

As populations increasingly moved into cities in the early twentieth century, urban spaces and their representations became common in the arts. This is especially true in modernist fiction, where writers would puzzle over the nature of cities. Were cities alienating landscapes that pitted an individual against an indifferent society? Or were cities the new lands of opportunity that fostered the connections necessary to succeed? This ambivalent approach to urban space pervades the modernist novel. Urban space (both locations in space and movement through it) is incredibly important in the modernist novel as it sheds light on themes, impinges on styles, and helps develop characters. Students in this course will examine three exemplary modernist novels (Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Ulysses) and their settings (Paris/Pamplona, London, and Dublin, respectively) with special attention to how specificity of place informs our understanding of the texts and creates meaning in its own right.
For more information on the course, please contact Dr. Geheber.