SoSe 17: PS-Surveying English Literatures II: The Beauty of Survival - Writing the Second World War
Andrew James Johnston
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Yet it is precisely this ambivalence that provides the basis for a number of recent complex literary attempts to re-fashion and interrogate the memory of the war, attempts focusing not only on the British experience – an experience highly diverse in itself – but also on that of other nations, peoples and communities. Thus, in literature written in English, the Second World War has become something of a perfect narrative theatre in which to stage issues of history and memory, identity and experience, story-telling and myth-making, and to cast these issues in terms of perspectives depending on the frequently conflicting dynamics of class, nation and gender.
This course will seek to trace some of these narrative trajectories in two novels The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje, 1992) and Atonement (Ian McEwan, 2001). Students are presumed to have acquired copies of these novels and to have read them before the course starts. They will be given the opportunity to prove their familiarity with the texts in a series of short tests.
close13 Class schedule
Regular appointments