Misfit Modernism

a course taught by

Octavio R. Gonzalez, MA

Twentieth Century Fiction I: 1900-1945

Rutgers University, Summer 2010

In this upper-level undergraduate English course, we read texts by “misfit modernists,” authors in the British-American tradition who pushed the boundaries of fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of these works were banned in their time, which only added to their allure. Today, these short stories and novels still have the capacity to shock—we will recognize our own secret longings and dark desires in the murky mirrors these authors wrought. Modernist misfits include now canonical yet still controversial writers alike: Henry James, James Joyce, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, James Weldon Johnson, Christopher Isherwood, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. (Give or take a few.) We also took a look at brief excerpts from novels by J.-K. Huysmans (Against Nature), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), and Jean Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers). Key themes include obsessional love, double lives, bohemianism and cosmopolitanism, and, of course, sex, drugs, and rock n roll. ♦

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