Ian Baucom, Duke University

The spectacle shock, speed, rush and crowds of Urban life are at the center of modernist aesthetics. Indeed many modernist texts are not only metropolitan works but ones in which the city emerges as something like a central “character”. In this course we will examine the ways in which a range o flate-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century writers attempted to come to terms with the experience of modern life through their representation of three European cities (London, Paris, and Venice). In doing so we will ask how the practice of writing the city, of recording its multitude of impressions, of consuming its spectacles, of delighting in it as a flanneur and of losing oneself in its crowds, structure some of modernism’s fundamental cultural an aesthetic protocols.

London
Week 1. Introduction
Week 2. Begin Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Week 3. Complete Conrad, The Secret Agent
Week 4. Begin Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Week 5. Complete Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Paris
Week 6. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life.” Begin Emile Zola, The Masterpiece
Week 7. Complete Zola, The Masterpiece
Week 8. Selections from the Paris sections of Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Week 9. Further selections from Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Venice
Week 10. Begin Henry James, Wings of the Dove
Week 11. Complete James, Wings of the Dove
Week 12. Selections from Venice sections of Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Requirements and Mode of Evaluation
Students are expected to attend and participate in all classes. They will be asked to write three 6-8 page essays. Each essay will count for 30% of the grade; the remaining 10% will be based on class participation. There are no exams.

Biography
B.A. in Political Science (Wake Forest), M.A. in African Studies and Ph.D. in English (Yale). Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the English Department of Duke. Member of the Modernist Studies Association committee on Interdisciplinary Studies and Fellow in the British American Partnership. Involved in organising a series of working conferences on the Black British arts scene with the Tate Galleries and the universities of East London and Duke. Was Assistant Professor of English at Yale where he co-curated an exhibition on three Black British artists at the University Art Gallery (title: The Unmapped Body). Author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); edited Atlantic Genealogies, a special edition of the “South Atlantic Quarterly” (Spring, 2002). Forthcoming work include: Shades of Black: The London Renaissance, a collection of essays on the black arts scene in post-war Britain, co-edited with Sonia Boyce and David A. Bailey and Afterlives of Romanticism, a special edition of the “South Atlantic Quarterly”, co-edited with Jennifer Kennedy and Anne Rowland (Summer 2003)