Paper VII: English Literature 5

This course introduces the students to select texts of British literary modernism covering the first 60 years of the 20th Century. It encompasses drama, poetry and the novel as genres, and includes major English, Irish and expatriate writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, John Osborne, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad. Chronologically, the course follows up on the 1st Year study of Victorian literature course but also laterally connects with Paper IX, and partly Paper VIII, which are described below. Framed by the political context of the two world wars, the rise of socialism, suffrage movements, the last moments of colonial glory and the rise of other Literatures in English, this course simultaneously introduces us to High Modernism through experiments in literary form that elaborate broad philosophical and social movements. From free verse to the stream of consciousness novel, the texts and genres covered are thus to be fully experienced using an interdisciplinary approach referring to the plastic and visual arts, the scientific and semi-scientific advances that, in this period, informed public and philosophical discourse in their interpretation of the various ‘realities’ of human experience. Consequently, co-curricular readings will drawn on sociology, psychology, aesthetics and philosophy to comprehend movements like Existentialism, Surrealism, Impressionism, Imagism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism and early Postmodernism, among others, in order to bring alive the broadest significance of what we call Modernism.