Matters of life and death: 21st-century fiction

‘Art,’ wrote Ali Smith, in her essay collection Artful, ‘is always about life-force and mortality’. This course takes three 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, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and Lars Iyer’s Wittgenstein Jr, students will learn about how the techniques and priorities of the modernist movement – writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce – are returning to contemporary fiction. We will explore how Smith, James and Iyer use this literary heritage to express what might otherwise be inexpressible: matters of life and death, including grief, violence, sexuality and identity.

Students will learn about how all three writers are indebted to modernist literary precursors. Smith has acknowledged her debts to Woolf, Joyce, and Wallace Stevens, among others. Iyer’s work contains echoes of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, and focuses on the philosophical legacy of perhaps the central thinker of the modernist period: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Marlon James draws on the work of William Faulkner and 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.