CLS2530

Modernism in European literature

Millicent Vladiv-Glover

8 points - 3 hours per week - First semester - Clayton - Prohibitions: SLA2530/SLA3530

Objectives On successful completion of this subject students should have acquired a theoretical and historical overview of the cultural phenomenon of European Modernism and be in a position to analyse texts theoretically in the context of ruptures or continuities in the cultures of 20th-century Europe.

Synopsis A study of the modernist movement as a supra-national European cultural paradigm. The texts will cover the literatures of both Eastern and Western Europe, and will be studied in English translation, though they may be read in their original languages. The poetics of the various modernist 'schools,' such as symbolism, futurism, expressionism and surrealism, will be studied in the context of the theory of the avant-garde and with reference to the major twentieth-century cultural paradigm shift from modernism to postmodernism.

Assessment Essay (3000 words): 45% - Class paper (1500 words): 25% - Test (1.5 hours): 30%

Prescribed texts

Bely A Petersburg Indiana U P
Gide A The counterfeiters Penguin
Hesse H Siddhartha Penguin
Nietzsche F The birth of tragedy Pantheon
Whitman W The complete poems Penguin
Woolf V To the lighthouse Vintage

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