COML 6360 - [Comparative Modernisms/Alternative Modernities]

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015. Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

N. Melas.

This course will inquire into the geographical coordinates that alternately relay and obscure the relation between modernism as an aesthetic movement and modernity as world-historical and political-economic project. Central emphasis will fall on colonialism and its particular inflection of the temporality of modernist aesthetics and the progress of modernity in the two regions that will be our focus: the French Caribbean and Mediterranean Egypt. While including canonical theoretical texts on Western modernity, modernism and postcolonial theory, readings will be focused on the multiple and intersecting influences around two central figures, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and the modern Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy.