Kursinformation

What do we mean by literary modernism in English? Its formative phase was an extremely heterogeneous ‘movement’ of individual authors (American, British, Irish and other) [MS1] whose work focussed on formal experimentation and thematic innovation. Moreover, they often [MS2] challenged conventional ideas about age, class, gender and sex, society and ethnicity, politics and religion, culture and commerce. The modernist revolution in the English language was a highly inter-[MS3] national and inter-regional (among other “inters”) movement. This lecture series, designed for students with an interest in either “English” or “American” literature or both, offers discussions of major fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. We will focus on several now classical authors: Polish-born Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield from New Zealand, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce from Ireland, English writers like Wilfred Owen, D. H. Lawrence, or Virginia Woolf, U.S. ‘expatriates’ like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, but also ‘stay-at-home’ Americans like William Faulkner. A very mixed crowd of gifted individuals, these writers explored many different forms of expressing modern existence in memorable ways. Hence they are still important today.