The course will expand and sharpen our understanding of Anglo-American Modernism with some points of contact to Continental developments of the period. Also the question of non-Western aspects of Modernism will be broached. We will be reading theoretical and fictional texts by T.S.Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wilfred Owen, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. We will listen to the music of Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten and watch two films: Sally Potter's Orlando (1992) and Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). The longer texts to be analysed in class are Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and William Faulkner's Pylon (each student should purchase copies of these books; to be available at the university bookstore). The emphasis will be on prose, with a few sidesteps to The War Poets.
Enrolment is restricted to twelve.
Assessment: group participation, presentation in class, essay of 10-12 pages. Two students will have an opportunity to organize a book exhibition on Modernism in the Humanika Library in March 2010; this is to be decided at the beginning of December 2009, so any group members interested please contact me then.