Twentieth-century English Literature course overview

(Notes from the lecture course: Twentieth-century English Literature, with Professor Duncan Chesney)

Week 1

The name of the course is problematic. "England” was consolidated in 1284 (including Wales). However, what we’re talking about in this course is Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Because of the size of The British Empire, when we’re talking about 20th century British Literature, we’re talking about pretty much the entire world.

When we talk about “English literature”, are we talking British, Anglophone, or English (and Wales)?

The story of the 20th-century British literature is the ending of the British Empire.

The Man Booker Prize: the most prestigious prize for the novel in the UK. From a rough survey of the prize recipients, we realize that not all of them consider themselves British (rather, English, Scottish, etc.).

Having gone through the extensive colonialist history. No one is purely one thing anymore. By fiat, we will limit ourselves to a much smaller canonical view.

A similar overview of Nobel Prize winners who write in English: Kipling, Yeats(Irish), Shaw, Galsworthy, Eliot, Russell, Churchill(what?), Beckett (Irish), White(Australian), Golding(English), Heaney (Irish), Soyinka(Nigeria), Gordimer (South African), …etc.

The most consecrated area in literature from the British Isles is actually Ireland.

The scope of our survey: 1901 – 1999

• 1901 Death of Queen Victoria, Empress of India
• 1901-1910 Edward VII (Edwardian era)
• 1910-1936 reign of George V
• Queen Elizabeth II

The Norton Anthology, like most other surveys, focus mainly on the first half of the 20th century, namely modernism and the reactions to it.

20th-century British cultural studies survey:

• Football, Rugby, Cricket, Beatles, Mick Jagger, Hitchcock, James Bond, Yorkshire Pudding, Bangers and mash, Bitter, Harry Potter, Scott’s Antarctic expedition, Sherlock Holmes (cinema)
• Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant, Jack Yeats, Francis Bacon, Agatha Christie, Vivien Leigh and Lawrence Olivier, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Punk Rock, 80s Heritage cinema, Man United, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Harrods, and English Garden and maze, Land Rover (the vehicle of the colonial world), Cooper Minis, Peter Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, Paddington Bear, Brexit…etc. 

The problem with this survey course is that a lot of the essential novels of the 20th century are way too long. For example, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Joyce's Ulysses, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Which is why there is a lot of poetry on the syllabus.

We will emphasize the majo20th-century authors: Joyce and Woolf, and Eliot and Keats. Plus Conrad, Pound, etc.

Some might start with Wilde, but in my opinion, Wilde points backward to the 19th century, and Conrad points forward to the 20th century. 

We will start with Joseph Conrad. Then, Thomas Hardy. He started his career with novels, then switch to poetry. We will skip D.H. Lawrence, and read A.E. Housman, whose poetry establishes the Edwardian tone. We will read first world war poets Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. And then Ezra Pound, who is the single most important figure (the enabler) of British Modernism. We will read Hulmen, who is an important figure of British Avant-Garde and Imagism. we will also read Hilda Doolittle, another important figure in British Avant-Garde. We will read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the masterpiece of 20th centurt poetry. We will spend a significant amount of time on W.B. Yeats, and discuss how he is not a modernist. We will read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Finally, we will read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, who is to be the major figure in the later half of our semester.  

We will skip over Kipling, Orwell, Auden, Larkin (most important British poet of the 60s), Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Beckett.

[1:02:00] Every literary work is a product of the human world. New Criticism isolates the work from its historical detail. But it can ignore important context.

Pay attention to cultural and historical context. Drinking a Guinness while reading Joyce helps you understand him better.

Modernism

Defining and periodizing Modernism is notoriously difficult. This class is limited to British and literature, so that makes matters easier. The period in question is 1890-1940.

There isn’t any clear movement proper in Britain. Each modernist writers have very little to do with each other, their connections only emerge when we place them in the larger European context.

Clearing up some interrelated terms: Modernization, Modernity, and Modernism. They all comes

Modernization involves the technologies that have maximized industrial production, namely the 3rd industrial revolution. Both in the change in the mode of production, and the change in relation to production in Europe.

Modernity is the overall social changes brought on by modernization, including urbanization, secularization, etc.

Modernism refers to artistic movements reacting to these changes. Expressionism, Impressionism, Surrealism, Imagism, Cubism, Futurism, etc. The flourishing of modernism in Art, related to Cézanne, Pablo Picasso (Cubism). The greatest cubist literary work: Gertrude Stein’s The Making of an American.
Henri Matisse, Malevich (abstraction happening, 1918, "White on White"), Kandinsky ("On White II", 1923), Mondrian, Braque (1910), Jean Arp (1920), Miró ("The Tilled Field", 1923-4), Salvador Dali (surrealism), Klimt ("The Kiss", 1907-8), Egon Schiele, Balla (Futurism), Boccioni (Futurism),…etc.

In music: Mahler, Debussy, Stravinsky, the birth of Jazz (Louis Armstrong)

In poetry: Mallarmé, Valéry, Apollinaire, Breton, etc; Marinetti, Montale, Ungaretti; George, Trakl, Rilke, Benn; Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, …

In novel: Proust, Lawrence, Kafka, Biely, Svevo, Joyce, Hemingway, Fauklner, Woolf, Mann, Musil, Gide, Dos Passos, Nabokov, etc.

Transcribed on Mar. 22, 2019.