Instr:                 Jane Nardin
Office:              CRT 494,     229-6402
e-mail:              jbnardin@uwm.edu
Office hours:     by appointment.

Course Information:          R  3:30-6:10pm       CRT

Reading:
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
        To the Lighthouse
        Between the Acts
        Complete Shorter Fiction
Katherine Mansfield: Stories
Jean Rhys: After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie
        The Collected Short Stories

Description:
In the early years of the twentieth century, musicians, painters, and writers began to create new art forms which could express the bewildering and exciting complexity of the modern world. Later in the century, critics coined the term "Modernism" to describe this movement.  Many women artists occupied an uneasy position with respect to Modernism: they wanted to explore new ways of telling women's stories, but felt unable to play the centrally-important cultural role in which
some of the movement's most prominent male theorists cast the experimental artist.
 
Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys are among the most interesting women writers of fiction who were influenced by Modernism. Woolf and Mansfield were friends, though they had mixed feelings about one another. Both experienced the world as breath-takingly lovely, but also as dark and dangerous, especially for women. And they expressed
this vision through similar literary techniques. Rhys, an elegant, economical stylist whose works seem less innovative than they actually are, was even more pessimistic.

In this course, we will read a mix of novels and short stories by these three writers, both for the sake of their intrinsic literary interest and to explore the relation of women to the Modernist movement.