Browse Hierarchy ESH213: Modernism

This module introduces you to the style, history, politics and controversies of modernism. We will read central modernist texts such as Joyce's 'Ulysses', Eliot's 'The Waste Land', and Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse', alongside a selection of modernist and modern writers, critics, journalists and intellectuals. In the first semester, we will see how modernism developed in the 1910s and 20s, and examine a range of contexts for its stylistic experiments in narrative and point of view, in urban life, war, sexual emancipation, and psychology. In the second semester, we will focus on the novel and its relation to time, history and new technologies of film and recording. We will then look at some examples of modernism in America including modernism's presence in African American culture.