Literary critic Valerie Shaw has written: “Modernism has given literary sanction to no-one having an easy mind, ever again”. But Modernism itself was a response to what felt like unprecedented and disorientating transformations – technological, philosophical, and social. The Victorian novel, H G Wells once claimed, “was produced in an atmosphere of security for the entertainment of secure people who liked to feel established and safe for good.” Novelists of the 20th century had no such comforts. How did individual writers respond to the challenges of psychoanalysis, two devastating World Wars, or the seismic shift in the way that social classes interacted and experienced each other’s presence? How were the old, familiar forms and structures of literary texts disassembled, reshaped to reflect a new kind of reality? Famously, Theodor Adorno suggested: “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”; his much-quoted dictum is frequently taken to mean that art itself becomes impossible in the context of a century of violence. But Adorno’s philosophy is much more complicated than that, as he spent the rest of his life trying to explain: “While the situation does not permit art, it nonetheless demands it.”
This course focuses on novelists from the second half of the 20th century, all of whom respond in different ways to the paradox that while modern life seems to resist literary representation, writers feel compelled to try, again and again, to capture their world in words. Their efforts range from the political to the joyously playful, and involve radical re-imaginings of what the novel can be and do. In our study of Greene, Beckett, Plath and Carter, we will place formal and linguistic experimentation in the context of the period's many social and historical complexities.
Note: Students are very welcome to take course Ha2, The modern novel I: one hundred years of experiments in narrative, consecutively with Hb2; or the courses may be taken independently.
