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Good news! After the intervention of a century, it is the 'twenties again - maybe not quite as roaring this time, but still resounding with a sense of impending change. As we celebrate multiple modernist centennials (e.g., those of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway) in our own decade, there remains something viscerally electrifying about Ezra Pound's famous dictum "Make It New." And yet this line - which, paradoxically, only came to be seen as a modernist slogan in retrospect, after the movement became "old news" - also invites some questions from our historical position: What was the galvanizing power of "newness" as a privileged concept for modernism? Does newness have a stable literary meaning? In this seminar, we examine the historical and formal newness of British modernist literature by tracing its literary ancestry, moment, and legacy. Reading texts by T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, and W.H. Auden, among others, we'll ask: From what ashes of hegemonic traditions did modernism have to rise in order to pronounce itself new? What new traditions did it beget? To what extent was the newness a fiction, and to what extent was it a reality? Finally, was British modernism itself a single tradition, or plural ones? (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)