Advanced studies in fiction and poetry

This short course offers some insight into what followed on from the literary revolution of early twentieth-century Modernism. How did writers in a primarily English formal tradition seek to learn something from the experiments, fragmentations and disruptions of their Modernist forerunners, yet also construct a different literary aesthetic and new forms of realism adequate to post-war experience?

This self-aware relationship between the writer and the world played itself out in many ways. Questions of emotional, social and political engagement encountered an inheritance that placed a high value on the personal inner life and detached, ironic observation. We will take writers, and their characters, who are caught in different forms of the tension between action and passivity, between articulation and silence.

Texts will be announced in September 2018.