Literature and Modernity

Early twentieth-century British writing read as a sustained reckoning with modernity itself — empire's fraying edges, the Great War, the metropolis, and the intellectual shocks of Bergson, Freud, and the turn to myth that pushed form into fragmentation. You'll work through imagist and high-modernist poetry, sit with Woolf's *To the Lighthouse* for a substantial stretch, and then pivot to Tayeb Salih to see modernism from outside the metropole, producing a short essay, a take-home midterm, a paper proposal, and a take-home final term paper. As a fourth-year required seminar, it expects you to already read closely and historically; the payoff is learning to situate literary innovation inside the political and philosophical crises that produced it.