This course will introduce you to literary modernism and give you the opportunity to read some of its most famous texts, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mrs. Dalloway and The Waste Land. The class will consider the history of modernist writing and its relationship to the major social, technological, and cultural changes of the early twentieth century. One particular emphasis of the class will be on the role of art and the artist in modern life; another will be on how the content and structure of many modernist texts reveal anxiety over emerging new attitudes towards sexuality and gender roles. In addition, the class will read two novels, published in the later decades of the twentieth century, and consider what critics mean when they refer to postmodernism.
The reading list for this course includes difficult poems, novels and short stories that are well known for their complexity, daring and innovation. You may find that you will need to read some of them more than once in order to grasp their multi-layered structures of meaning.

Texts: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Katherine Mansfield, Stories; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Graham Swift, Waterland; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body