3-4 Credits
Professor Upton
TR 1:20-2:35pm
Fulfills diversity requirement.

Modernist literature, the avant-garde writing of the early 20th century, has been called a literature of crisis. Poets, novelists, and playwrights all responded to a common perception that civilization as they knew it was crumbling around them. Social conditions, literary customs, and inherited modes of philosophy and theology: all seemed on the brink of collapse. In response, modernist writers adopted truly radical and revolutionary modes of writing in the hopes of shaking their audiences into awareness and action.

One particular area of concern to the modernists was religion, writing as they did at a time of religious skepticism and unprecedented encounters with non-Western traditions. A wide range of writers increasingly turned to pre-modern mystical traditions in an attempt to rejuvenate religious life. Mysticism, the direct awareness of the presence of God, seemed to provide a more direct, immediate religious experience, one that was potentially subversive and regenerative. At the same time, many of these writers began to find analogous texts in non-western religious traditions, especially those of India. Modernist writers were active at a time when the relationships between Europe and its colonial possessions were changing rapidly and dramatically. Increasingly, Europe’s colonial oppression was recognized with horror and condemnation. This situation resulted, for the modernists, in fascinating and potentially problematic comparisons between western mystical sources and Indian texts.

This class will ask what problems modernist writers saw in religious thought and practice, and why they saw the need to turn to mysticism on the one hand and non-western sources, especially those of India, on the other. It will also ask whether the categorization of Indian texts as “mysticism” is itself appropriate. This course will first examine some classics of pre-modern western mysticism, in particular, the work of Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Teresa of Avila. Then, it will examine in depth the work of a select group of modernist writers in the attempt to discern how they adopt various elements of that mysticism for their own purposes. Finally, we will read passages from select Indian texts for critical comparison.

The course will examine poems by W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot.

Texts may include:
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha

We will also examine the philosophical fragments of Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace.