21st-century fiction and the ghosts of Modernism

‘Art,’ wrote Ali Smith, in her essay collection Artful, ‘is always about life-force and mortality’. This course takes two exciting and innovative contemporary novels and uses them to trace a path back in literary history. Through a close examination of Ali Smith’s How to be Both and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, students will learn about how the techniques and priorities of the modernist movement – writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce – are returning to contemporary fiction. We will explore how Smith and Saunders use this literary heritage to express what might otherwise be inexpressible: grief, violence, political upheaval, sexuality, gender, and identity. 

Students will learn about how both writers are indebted to modernist literary precursors. Smith has acknowledged her debts to Woolf, Joyce, and Wallace Stevens, among others, while Saunders’s novel incorporates modernist techniques of stream of consciousness narrative and polyphony. Students will see for themselves how this modernist legacy has helped shape a form of fiction that does not merely seek to illustrate or represent, but which wrestles with what can and cannot be said, and which seeks to marry content to form.