Graduate Studies in 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.