Courses

“This is the war that will end war!” So wrote H. G. Wells, in August 1914, in the first week of World War One. He was wrong, but his sentiment and dream have shadowed these last hundred years: Can mass war be the generator of infinite peace? Can a pandemic yield improved health? Can the shock of racial injustice and violence usher in a future of equality and justice? Does the revolutionary moment or act have the power to transform the world for the better? These questions belong to us in 2020/21 as they did to modernist literary writers from a century ago, and in this course we will read a variety of works from the first 40 years of the 20th century that explored the terrain from struggle to possibility. Our organizing themes as we read these works are: Youth, War, Illness, Gender, and Race, though each of these is interconnected with the others. Our course focuses on English-language works, from England, Ireland, India and the Caribbean; we will study how their rich literary experiments were fueled by the prospects of catastrophic loss and struggle, on the one hand, and euphoric hope, even utopia, on the other.