Module overview
What does it mean to make literature new? Why create a revolution of the word? In this module you will study the revolutionary literary transformations of modernism. Modernism responded to the advent of modernity: urbanisation, imperialism, mechanisation, consumer capitalism and two World Wars. It did so on a global scale, producing modernisms all around the world. Through radical formal experimentation, writers extended twentieth-century advances in the understanding of time and space, consciousness, language, desire and perception. Modernists broke with inherited conventions of genre, narrative, originality, realism and authorship. In modernist writing, established rules of grammar, syntax and typography were overturned. This module will explore the formal strategies of modernist literature as a global phenomenon, and the revolutionary ideas it aimed to express.