In this subject students are introduced to postcolonial reading practice through the study of modernist writing in English. Modernism—a cluster of early twentieth-century experimental and avant-garde movements in literature and the arts—has been very influential in the institutionalisation of Western literary criticism and the histories of European canon-formation. Set texts by writers from a range of countries will be situated in the contexts of colonial and post-independence cultures and experiences of gender, race, class, sexuality, desire, ethnicity, nation and expatriation. Students examine the ways in which writers have negotiated and shaped modernist practices of representation, tensions between the narrative possibilities of modernism and realism, and the recent Western anthropological, psychological and philosophical theories which often informed modernist practices of representation.

Subject rules

Readings