Modernist Fiction, Imperial Decline, and Decolonization
The literary historical period we call “modernism” (c. 1880-1945) sees the height of the British empire in its territorial span while also bearing witness to its decline in the face of anti-colonial and national independence movements. How was empire and its loss represented by modernist authors? How did their aesthetic strategies mediate racial and colonial difference? And how did authors from the colonies simultaneously take up and challenge modernist forms in their efforts at anti-colonial resistance and decolonization? What kinds of modernist literary and sociological institutions facilitated the emergence of postcolonial authors in the postwar period? This course will introduce students to key modernist novels; trace the evolution of modernism through its subperiods of high modernism, late modernism, and postcolonial modernity; and think through the political affordances of modernist aesthetic practices. We will focus primarily on the history of Britain and its colonies, though we may also turn to the Harlem Renaissance to consider modernism in a transatlantic frame. Given the focus on fiction, the course will be reading-intensive and students should be prepared to cover a novel (some longer, some shorter) each week. Texts we are likely to study include: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September; George Orwell’s Burmese Days; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable; Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea; Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners; George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin; and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing.