Victorianism to Modernism - Einzelansicht

The course introduces into a period of crucial transition in Britain from the 19th to the 20th century, a time of immense, thorough social, political, cultural changes, challenges and threats.
We will focus on aspects of Victorian society, culture and literature and follow up some major developments into the early 20th century era of modernism. Fin de Siecle, modernism and World War I are keywords that relate to this period. The time of the late Victorian era and early 20th century relates to a wide range of experimental and avantgarde trends in arts (incl. literature). In literature, this primarily relates to a rejection of 19th-century traditions and conventions and a termination of the previous consensus between author and reader in realism. Modernists, then, regarded themselves as a cosmopolitan avantgarde subverting bourgeois values. This subversion was expressed both in complex formal experiment and in provocative subject matter such as urban cultural dislocation. The realism-based continuity of chronological development was challenged; new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts found expression in the stream-of-consciousness technique. Complex collages of fragmentary images substituted allusions to logical, teleological exposition of thoughts and can be read as repercussions of the writers' alert awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. And the trauma of World War I left repercussions in the arts too, for sure.
During the course, we will problematise aspects of these transitions. We will look (a) into concepts of modernism and (b) investigate into innovative modernist aesthetic impulses in canonical and noncanonical texts/writers.The course offers a brief survey of 19th-century and early 20th-century changes in culture/literature and society. Changing gender concepts as well as aspects of representations of the British Empire will be of particular interest.

Please follow the "comment" link above for more information on course requirements and grading.