Modern British Literature

Catalog description

This course will explore the modernist movement in 20th century British fiction through the works of three of its most prominent practitioners - James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf - as well as selected works by other writers. The course will examine the birth of the modern aesthetic in literature not only as a response to the alienation and despair resulting from World War I but also as a reaction to the enormous impact made by the ideas of such thinkers as Darwin, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. Various modernist writing techniques, including stream-of-consciousness, episodic narrative and radical experimentation with punctuation, will also be studied.