463T SEMINAR IN LITERARY THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, Maxwell & Valente.  TU 34:50 TOPIC: The Celtic and Harlem Renaissances

In this comparative and collaborative seminar, we will explore the literary, historical, and theoretical ties between two seemingly far-flung modern movements of cultural renaissance and minority self-definition: the Celtic Renaissance headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and the Harlem Renaissance centered in black Manhattan, New York.  We'll begin by discussing why and how the Celtic Renaissance served as a self­conscious prototype for Harlem's revivalist avant-garde.  The bulk of the course, however, will address controversies sparked by the common resistance strategies of these early 20th-century renaissances, especially those involving the movements' equal doses of urban pride and rural longing.  We'll examine the competing uses of mourning in the movements' early reliance on elegiac literary forms; subsequent conflicts between High Modernist stylistic opacity and plain-speaking, populist social realism; the simultaneously liberating and oppressive devising of a folk constituency; persistent genderings of rural and urban spaces and of the migrations between them; and the traces of both renaissances in ongoing debates over race, identity, literary modernism, the modern(ist) city, and the effects and limits of cultural politics more generally.

TEXTS:       On the Celtic side, readings are likely to comprise essays, poems, and plays by Padraic Colum, John Eglinton, Oliver Gogarty, Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, Arthur Griffith, Douglas Hyde, James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, Padraic Pearse, James Stephens, John Synge, and W. B. Yeats.  Harlem texts may include essays, poems, and novels by Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jesse Fauset, Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson, Nella Larsen, Alain Lockc, Claude McKay, Bruce Nugent, George Schuyler, and Jean Toomer.