Daniel R Morse

Mulk Raj Anand's self-description – in a 1945 broadcast about war-time London – as an ‘impatient modernist’ highlights Anand's ability to harness the velocity of broadcast production, transmission, and reception into an aesthetic of speed. Pairing Anand's unpublished BBC scripts with his war-time novel The Big Heart (1945), I show how Anand's work remediating contemporary texts for broadcast accompanied a shift in his approach to writing fiction, using the technique of intertextual scaffolding to accelerate composition. This article proposes that the name of Anand's impatience was realism – that Anand's fascination with literary modernists such as Joyce and Woolf was tempered with a desire for the immediacy and social embeddedness of realism and that broadcasting encouraged Anand in his attempt to pair modernism's cosmopolitanism and polyvocality with realism's speed, engagement, even ephemerality. Challenging the often feeble distinction between realism and modernist anti-representational technics, Anand's radio writing captures the contradictions of combined but uneven development.

Broadcasting for the BBC’s Eastern Service to Indian listeners during the 1940s, E. M. Forster attempted to shape the use of transnational broadcasting in the service of more equitable relationships of exchange rather than exploitation. Taking advantage of radio’s intimate address to explore the ethical possibilities opened by conversation over distance, Forster’s broadcasting career aids in rethinking his earlier fiction and challenging posi- tions from the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School to the post-colonialism of Said and his followers, as well as centrifugal models of empire that continue to inform critical practice. What we learn is that the power of modern technology, in conjunction with Forster’s critical humanism as developed in his novels, can be made to bridge the gaps of alienation and colonialism in the right hands.

Robert Darnton famously described book history as " one of the few sectors in the human sciences where there is a mood of expansion and a flurry of new ideas. " Indeed, for literary scholars, a renewed attention to the materiality of texts and the networks in which they circulate has spurred exciting new interdisciplinary scholarship. Book History has also done much to expand the archive, considering the " low brow, " " middle brow, " and " high brow " interchangeably. This course will provide a background in some of the major theoretical statements to come from the field, including work on crucial nodes often ignored or dismissed in the study of " literature: " libraries, readers, publishers, and booksellers.

We'll then turn to the exhilarating (and humbling) task of considering the future of the book by examining new formats as well as outdated (and flat-out wrong) twentieth-century predictions of the book's demise. In other words, we'll use futures past (of film, television, and audiobooks) to frame our thinking in the contemporary moment. With this historical context in mind, we'll tackle some of the thorny questions of our present textual moment: How do you read T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as an app? How about Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota? How should scholars work with a text that’s an audiobook before or instead of becoming a print book?

The course will include visits to and collaborations with our library’s Special Collections and the Black Rock Press. As a seminar in theory, the course welcomes students of all periods and specializations as well as MFA students interested in “the book.”

Course Description: The Enlightenment was one of the most influential processes in modernity, altering our ideas about government, history, economics, art, social relations, and the very idea of the individual. Modern humans, acting on Enlightenment principles and using scientific and technological discoveries, have completely altered the globe. But, as Theodor Adorno and others point out, while modernity brings exciting developments like individual rights and freedoms, it does not stop humanity from using new powers (over the earth and one another) to do irreparable harm. What, then, do we do with modernity's penchant for reflection, or self-reflexivity (represented—above—by Adorno's self-portrait)? How can we form just communities when things are not predetermined but instead up to us? In the twenty-first century, the complexity of the global economic system makes it increasingly difficult for the driving force of modernity, the middle class, to maintain its identity and optimism. Through lectures, readings, and discussion, this course will assess where we've come from and how we got here in order to give you the framework necessary to understand and shape the world around us.

Course Description: It's frustrating to be a teenager anywhere, but a number of Irish novels suggest that the problem of youth was especially acute in twentieth-century Ireland. This seminar explores adolescence as both literal subject and provocative metaphor. We'll consider, first, the Irish bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) and its conspicuous failure to reconcile the individual with society. Second, we'll reverse our gaze and consider the growing pains of Ireland as nation with special attention to the violence of anti-imperial resistance, civil war, and sectarian hostility as well as the possibilities and pitfalls of writing in Irish in what we can now call the " teen years " following the Gaelic revival.

This seminar introduces graduate students to the professional study of literature. The twenty-first century is both a thrilling and unnerving time to undertake graduate studies in English and the course will investigate how we got here, how to survive, and how to take advantage of the many exciting possibilities of the future. Each meeting will be structured around a practical skill or academic genre (e.g. abstracts, conference papers, book reviews, and scholarly articles) as well as a selection of methodologies that inform current research. These are likely to include Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Post-structuralism, Western Marxism, New Historicism, Ecocriticism, Critical Race Theory, Book History, Postcolonial Studies, and Digital Humanities. Regular guest appearances by English faculty will also introduce students to our department. The goal of the course is to allow students to link practical, day-to-day strategies with wider dialogues in the Humanities and encourage them as they refine their critical approaches, fields of study, and intellectual trajectories.

Totality, in vogue in a wide variety of forms in the first half of the twentieth century, was roundly critiqued in the second half. Yet it's starting to revive in altered form. From the bad totalities of the earlier period (total war, the total artwork, totalitarianism, etc.) we've turned to more flexible models (of globalization, world literature, climate change, etc.). This course takes up the problem of totalities then and now through the prism of British Modernism (a grouping of literary texts that is itself a questionable totality). We'll read works that pursue an exhaustive depiction of their moment even as they call attention to the impossibility of such a project: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Richard Wright's Lawd Today!, and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. The course pairs these texts with totalities formulated and resisted by Saint-­‐Amour, Tsitsi Jaji and others. Roughly a third of the course's energies will be devoted to the ins and outs of archival research, manuscript studies, and textual scholarship. In addition to writing and revising a seminar paper based on their interests, students will give presentations on the textual history of the day's primary readings. Through the lens of totality, the course will introduce students to pressing topics in the field of modernist studies, from the modern epic to media ecology, " the archive " to empire, critique génétique to the environment.