Postwar Modernism: Literature & Thought

This course will examine how postwar European authors grapple with the inadequacies of language in the wake of unspeakable violence. We will explore how postwar experimentation intensifies modernist innovations that were already underway, and the ways in which these texts perhaps reflect an unprecedented historical breach. The postwar period sees a number of philosophers who champion the ambiguity of literature as socially or morally salutary, and write in an increasingly expressive prose. Yet many literary works thematize their own limits and begin to adopt philosophical and political terminology. Why and how do the boundaries that typically distinguish literary genre, and literature and thought, break down at this particular point in the 20th century? How does art--and the reformulation of language and genre--play a role in healing, mourning, or changing society in the aftermath of mass death? An analogous question will be: how do these texts, written amid European crises of roughly a century ago, speak to us in our contemporary moment of crisis and upheaval? Readings will include works by Koeppen, Brecht, Beckett, Heidegger, Adorno, Ausländer, Celan, Bachmann, and Domin.