Make It New: Innovation and Experiment in Modernist Literature, 1910-1940

This course examines a range of literary works from 1910-1940, a period sometimes known as 'High Modernism' and exemplified by Ezra Pound’s slogan ‘Make It New’. The course explores how writers responded to the tumultuous changes of the early twentieth century by engaging in a radical dismantling of the literary forms and conventions of the previous century, finding, in Virginia Woolf’s words, that ‘the tools of one generation are useless to the next’. A particular focus is on how modernist novelists experimented with techniques for the representation of mental life, such as free indirect discourse, interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness. The course examines key modernist texts by British, Irish and American writers, but also texts from outside the Anglo-American ‘centre’, European texts in translation, and texts not traditionally considered ‘modernist’. The aim will be to gain a sense of the breadth and diversity of modernist creative expression in its response to the tumultuous changes of the period: the impact and aftereffects of the Great War of 1914-1918; the acceleration and mechanization of everyday life; the growing influence of mass media, fashion and consumer culture; the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in the 1920s and 1930s; and far-reaching changes in attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and the politics of race and class.