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The four writers who will be the focus of the course—T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, and Anton Chekhov—each experimented in different ways with what it meant to represent ontologies in the avant-garde of modernist literature. In one of Woolf’s many reviews of Chekhov she admires his edifying, ethico-spiritual effects on the reader: “as we read these little stories about nothing at all, the horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom.” Together in this course we will explore how these writers wrestle (both overtly and covertly) with questions about formal experimentation in tension with ideas of ontological and spiritual freedom, particularly as these relate to the natural world. How did these writers generate poetics of meaning-making about the natural? How did they register human ontologies in relation to threats from post-industrial environmental degradation?
Course Requirements: In-class presentation; engaged participation; final essay.