LIT650   Mid-Century Modernism   (30 credits)

Description

The module will introduce students to current research and scholarship relating to literature of the `long modern' period (1930 to 1975), introducing them to the history and contemporary state of criticism and theory in relation to mid twentieth-century cultural production. Students will receive a thorough grounding in research methods specific to the period. This is a period of unprecedented violence and transformation, from the momentous impact of totalitarian systems, the rise and impact of the Second World War on global culture, host to the worst events the world has ever experienced with the Holocaust and Bomb, the age of rapid and shifting groups and movements, existentialism through abstract expressionism to confessional, innovative and pop art styles. It is also an era of very deep reflection on the idea of the relations between systems of thought across disciplines. The module will chart that reflection as well as a forum for thinking about arts power in a world under new techno-political compulsions, be they nuclear-apocalyptic, Cold War-propagandized, or transnational, neo-imperial, superpowered or postcolonial.

Reading List