Title: 20TH CENTURY BRITISH FICTION (3)

PRQ:

Critics have positioned A. S. Byatt’s Booker-winning Possession as a postmodern classic that plays with genres, combining elements of the detective novel, Victorian poetry, the epistolary novel, fairytales, and metafiction, as well as a post-postmodern text that returns us to “traditional” storytelling. While Possession epitomizes Byatt’s approach to narrative, it also underscores Byatt’s critique of the state of literary scholarship and theory. And, it accomplishes all of this through “possessing” the reader. In this course, which surveys a century plus of British fiction, we will use Byatt’s novel and approach to narrative as a lens through which we will read the work of other British writers, such as Woolf, Maugham, Forster, Barker, Barnes, McEwan, and Smith. In essence, we will look back through the twentieth century and the first few years of the twenty-first century through Byatt’s Neo-Victorian and contemporary lens, considering and perhaps reconsidering modernist and postmodernist approaches to literature. 

Some of the questions we will grapple with this term include, but are not limited to: How does the British novel develop/change over this century plus? How does it differ from/resemble its Victorian precursors? Is the British short story unique? What are modernism and postmodernism and how do they differ? Which elements or affinities do they share? Are these terms effective and relevant when considering novels that might be labeled British-postcolonial? Are we still living in a “postmodern” era? What are the basic assumptions and methodologies of various literary theories and hermeneutics and how can they be applied and critiqued? If it’s true, as Terry Eagleton claims, that we are living in an “After Theory” era, is literary theory still relevant? If it is, how can we, as scholars, use theory as we learn to write artistically and cogently about literature? 

TBA