SoSe 17: PS-Surveying English Literatures: Modernist HisStories
Cordula Lemke
Comments
The period of Modernism distrusts and questions the claim of human reason to be a reliable means for understanding and controlling the world. The continuous process of decentring the subject which philosophers, theologians, psychologists and scientists alike described and perpetuated at the end of the nineteenth century led to new ways of writing and story-telling at the beginning of the twentieth century. Narrative strategies were reconsidered within a newly structured world, textual experiments were celebrated as empowering spaces for the shaken subject, textual patterns were emphasised in order to compensate for the loss of a more tangible world order. Textual representation served as a 'hyper-realist' depiction of the chaotic state of decay whereas story telling provided a potential panacea in a world devoid of meaning. In this seminar we will look at the close relationship of textuality, story-telling and subjectivity in three canonical modernist texts.
Texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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Regular appointments