Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are canonical writers, they are literary titans of the 20th century. They were born in the same year, 1882, and they both died in 1941. They knew one another and they knew one another’s work. As modernist writers, they experiment with literary techniques and challenge narrative “realist” conventions: they change the way stories were told by focussing on their characters’ consciousness and on the manifold ways reality could be perceived and presented. Yet, their texts differ widely.
In this class, we will read short and epic modernist narratives: We will start with examples from Joyce’s Dubliners and Woolf’s short stories, before we will delve into Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses (yes, we will!). We will read these texts with a very close look at their literary techniques and narrative structures, as well as their presentation of human consciousness and their characterisation of early 20th-century societies.
Please get your own copy of the following books – and start reading Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses now (!).
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (e.g. Penguin Modern Classics or Oxford World’s Classics edition).
James Joyce, Dubliners, (e.g. Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics edition).
James Joyce, Ulysses (e.g. the Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics edition).
There will be additional critical texts in the course of the seminar. |
