Being Modern: The British Novel Since 1900

This course offers an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century British novel, focusing on how and why authors of this era conceive of their work as modern, or as responding to the personal, cultural, and historical shocks of modernity. If literature, as Ezra Pound famously put it, is "news that stays news," then this course seeks to understand the role of permanent novelty and experimentation in a diverse range of modern novels. What does it mean for a novel to be modern, and do early twentieth-century novels reflect a different conception of the modern than those published in the twenty-first? Is a novel modern according to the historical circumstances in which it was produced, or according to its engagement with modern notions of form and content? To answer these questions and to develop others, we read a variety of modernist and contemporary fictions, paying equal attention to formal and historical readings. Authors may include, but are not limited to, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and Tom McCarthy. (4 credits)