- Enseignant-e: Sangam Macduff
These lectures provide a broad introduction to Modernist Literature. Rather than taking its subject as a given, however, the course will explore how ‘Modernist Literature’ can be defined. Does the term refer to a particular literary period, to a recognisable form of literary production, or to a specific group of texts? We will begin by considering some of the ways Modernism and Modernist literature have been defined previously: as a historical period, usually situated in the first half of the twentieth century, although it has been stretched backwards and forwards; as an artistic movement––encapsulated by the maxim ‘Make it New’––which seeks to break with traditional forms of knowledge and representation; as an aesthetic response to the conditions of modernity, including globalisation, urbanisation, capitalism, alienation, fragmentation, and loss of faith; or as a set of canonical texts, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), which are often taken to exemplify Modernist literature. Reading these works alongside a variety of contemporary texts, including Imagist and Vorticist poetry, Surrealist literature, free verse, experimental fiction, and avant garde drama, as well as ‘late’ Modernist works which overlap with postmodern and postcolonial literature, we will explore what, if anything, allows such diverse works to be characterised as ‘Modernist’. In doing so, we will explore the field from several perspectives: a vertical, historical axis (as a literary period, in Modernist writers’ attitudes to their own history, and the temporality of their works); a horizontal, synchronous axis, which draws on ‘New Modernist Studies’ to enlarge the traditional focus on Anglo-American literature (the infamous ‘men of 1914’) to consider historically marginalised voices from fresh critical perspectives (e.g., feminist, queer, postcolonial, and ecocritical modernisms); and formal dimensions of the works one might or might not wish to call ‘Modernist Literature’.
The course texts will be available to download on this page.