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The shaping of the self is inextricably linked to temporal and spatial parameters: the self develops over time and is rooted in historical time; but the self is also enabled or constrained by the spaces it moves through or inhabits. In a similar way, spatial and temporal organization is a vital part of the social structure in which the individual is embedded, whose relationship to this spatio-temporal order is inflected by various axes of social differentiation like gender, sexuality, class, race etc. among other things.
This course focuses on the years between 1919 and 1939, a time of international conflict, political upheaval, economic instability and social change particularly affecting gender and class relations. It was also a period of aesthetic innovation and experimentation with temporal and spatial coordinates, not only in literature but also in film (this is the time of transition from silent to sound film, and of the early career of Alfred Hitchcock). In this period, reconfigurations of time and space are to be expected, especially in the arts, where we find a number of spatial representations that indicate an unmooring of conventional ideas of the self: the demise of the country house, fast-paced urban cultures, foreign places, hotels and other temporary dwellings.
Please buy and read the following texts before the beginning of the semester; further material will be made available in class:
Bryher, Two Novels: Development and Two Selves (ed. Joanne Winning)
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie |
