• Straub Julia

• Straub Julia

2022 sees the celebration of the modernist centennial: a hundred years ago, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and James Joyce’s novel Ulysses were published. In the spring semester, an MA seminar was dedicated to modernist poetry. In this seminar now we will focus on prose writing, i.e., mainly narrative fiction that captures the zeitgeist of the modernist period in terms of themes and style. We will read novels, essays and short stories that will bring to life the lively intellectual and aesthetic debates that shaped this period of great social turmoil. We will thereby place our focus on narratives that depict the social conditions, concerning class and gender equality, in early 20^th-century Britain. We will read two novels – Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) (in this order) – and other, shorter texts (e.g., by D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield) and students are strongly advised to start reading before the semester begins. Additional theoretical reading will help us conceptualize ideas gleaned from our reading of the primary sources.

(Participation in the spring semester class is not a prerequisite for attending this seminar).

Students can apply analytical tools and theoretical concepts to their study of narrative fiction belonging to different genres.

Students have a thorough grasp of the modernist historical and cultural context and its relation to literary production.

Students can provide persuasive accounts of complex literary texts both orally and in writing.

These are the recommended editions of the two novels that we will read. Copies can be purchased at Librophoros. The other, shorter texts will be made available on Moodle.

Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. Ed. Hermione Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780241371954.

E. M. Forster. A Room with a View. London: Penguin English Library, 2012. ISBN: 9780141199825.