ATS3421 Literature and modernism

Modernism has long been a term used to describe a radical international and experimental movement in the arts dating roughly from 1900 to 1940. More recently, however, modernism has undergone a reassessment and is now increasingly seen as an ongoing aesthetic response to various social, technological, and political transformations. This unit will examine some of the major figures of avant-garde and 'High' modernism (e.g. Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot) but it will also be attentive to examples of neglected modernist literature (e.g. Leonora Carrington, Jean Rhys), as well as to modernism's afterlife in postmodern and contemporary literature. We will reflect on some of the period’s major cultural and material upheavals, including urbanisation, scientific innovation, the women's movement and political extremism. Our focus will be on the literary works from both within and outside of the English-speaking world that stand at the heart of definitions and debates about modernism. Foreign-language texts will be studied in English translation.