Course info

andemics, ecological crises, economic collapse – the current historical moment appears to be uniquely marked by a sense of impending apocalypse. And yet, as we will see in this course, images and narratives of the ‘end of days’ have long been a standard of cultural representations and practices, used historically towards a wide range of ideological, affective, and political ends. Together, we will learn how to read these ideological currents in diverse literary genres as they relate to the intersecting categories of race, gender, sexuality, class. These discussions will be focussed on novels, plays, poems, short fiction, and non-fiction from the period of early-to-high modernism (c. 1880- 1945), including H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, W.B. Yeats, H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost,  Archibald MacLeish, W.H. Auden, Flann O'Brien, Aldous Huxley, and Samuel Beckett. Literary modernism was shot through with a rhetoric of apocalyptic crisis, revelation and “making it new” via diverse millennial visions of artistic, cultural, religious and political transformation. By focusing on literary modernist representations of the 'end of the world' in diverse contexts, genres, and representational modes, together we will consider how, in the first half of the 20th century, the limits and meanings of history, truth and the human were being redrawn and remade.
N.B. Please note that there will be no sessions on the 2nd, 9th, or 16th of July. These missing sessions will be replaced by a supplementary block session on Saturday 14 June from 10:00 – 16:00.
Please arrange to purchase or otherwise access a copy of the following novels, poetry collections and plays for this course: Flann O'Brien, "The Poor Mouth" H.D., “Trilogy” Samuel Beckett, "Endgame" The remaining poems, short stories, and secondary readings will be available online or via Moodle.