ENG274 Modernist Fiction
Course Aims This course introduces students to the themes and forms of modernist fiction within their cultural and historical milieus. Students first explore the artistic and intellectual movements and cultural positions of the period (1900 – 1945). They explore the core epistemological question in Modernism (the so-called “crisis of representation”), and then the ideological and psychological significance of modernist experimentations, their narratology, the issue of gender in modernist writing, and the interplay between politics, form and style in selected texts. Students survey the works of major modernist writers, and in the latter part of the course, move towards the limits of the modernist canon which may have heralded the appearance of post-modernist discourse.