HUMS 404, Modernities: Literature in the Era of Tyrannies 1919-1960

Meeting Time: 
T 9.25-11.15

Course Description:

Political writing of the mid-20th century with emphasis on ideologies, including communism, fascism and democracy. Emphasis on British, French, and American authors such as Orwell, Camus, Sartre, Greene, Duras, and Arendt.

Students must be in sophomore, junior, or senior year.

Led by:

David Bromwich's picture

Professor David Bromwich

Professor David Bromwich is a Sterling Professor of English. He has published widely on Romantic criticism and poetry, and on eighteenth-century politics and moral philosophy. His book Politics by Other Means concerns the role of critical thinking and tradition in higher education, and defends the practice of liberal education against political encroachments from both Left and Right. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other U.S. and British journals.

He is a frequent contributor of political blog posts on the Huffington Post. Since 2017, he has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC. 

 
Alice Kaplan | Department of French

Professor Alice Kaplan

Alice Kaplan, John M. Musser Professor of French, is a specialist of 20th century France.  She works at the intersection of literature and history, using a method that allies archival research with textual analysis.  She is also a literary translator. 

Her teaching and research have focused on the Second World War, the Liberation, and the Algerian War, and on the writers Céline, Proust, and Camus.   

Outside Yale, she is a member of the Writers Council of the American Library in Paris, and sits on the board of the French journal Critique as its New Haven correspondent.  She is currently serving as a jury member for the French Voices Book Prize, a translation subvention awarded by the cultural services of the French Embassy in New York. 

Her articles and review have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, Critique, and Yale French Studies, as well as the online magazine Contreligne.