Modernism

AY2014/2015 Semester 1

With a distinct focus on the experimental literature of the early decades of the twentieth century, this course is intended to provide a coherent understanding of literary Modernism by offering readings of selected texts by authors like Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B.Yeats, against a backdrop of war, social upheaval and industrial development, as well as literary and artistic innovation. The literature of this period is marked by its rejection of tradition, despite it's valorisation of intellectual, literary and artistic precedents and this is, in part, reflected by its subdivision into various trends during this period, like Symbolism, Imagism, Futurism, Expressionism and Surrealism.