ENG 4175 Modern British Literature: Seminar I ‐‐‐ Mythopeia: Modernism and the Inklings (3 credits) Section A (Fall) Professor Dominic Manganiello Description The practice of “mythopeia” is one of the distinctive features of literary modernism. In T.S. Eliot’s famous formulation, twentieth‐century writers adopted the “mythical method” as a structural device to give form and value to the meaningless flux of the present. Paradoxically, the use of this ordering principle often led modernists to a radical demythologizing that revived an ancient split between mythos (‘word,” “mystery”) and logos (“reason”). The group known as the Inklings also privileged the myth‐making faculty in their writings, but they insisted on the interdependence of myth, language, and meaning in an attempt to re‐mythologize the modern world. The seminar will explore various aspects of these alternating rhythms of modernism by focusing on key literary texts of the period in the light of theories of myth advanced in some cases by the authors themselves, while in others by prominent thinkers such as Frazer, Jung, Ricœur, and Girard. Method Seminar Grading Seminar paper 25%; seminar work 25%; research paper 50% Texts The Norton Anthology of English Literature (The Twentieth Century and After), (8th edition), Vol. F Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford) James Joyce, Ulysses (The Student’s Annotated Edition) (Penguin) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford) Chesterton, The Man who was Thursday (Penguin) C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Houghton Mifflin) Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (Eerdmans) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Harper Collins) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Devil to Pay (in Two Plays [Vineyard Books]) Texts available at University of Ottawa bookstore.
http://www.english.uottawa.ca/UG_brochure_2010-2011
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