AustLit logo

AustLit

Re-situating Modernism: Decolonising Contexts (ENG2REM / ENG3REM)
2009

Texts

Disgrace!$!Coetzee, J.!$!!$!Random House!$!
s
A question of power!$!Head, B.!$!!$!Heinemann!$!
s
Voyage in the dark!$!Rhys, J.!$! !$!Penguin!$!
Heart of darkness!$!Conrad, J.!$! !$!Penguin!$!
y separately published work icon The Aunt's Story Patrick White , London : Routledge , 1948 Z470389 1948 single work novel (taught in 27 units)

'With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity.' (From the publisher's website.)

A bend in the river!$!Naipaul, V.!$!!$!Picador!$!
s

Description

Modernism is the name given retrospectively to a range of early twentieth-century experimental and avant-garde trends in literature and the arts. Appreciation of its aesthetic theories and practices has been very influential in the institutionalisation of Western literary criticism and the histories of European canon-formation. In this unit modernism and variously modernist writing in English are re-situated in the contexts of colonial and post-independence cultures and experiences of gender, race, class, sexuality, desire, ethnicity, nation and expatriation. Students examine the ways in which writers have negotiated and shaped modernist practices of representation, tensions between the narrative possibilities of modernism and realism and the recent Western anthropological, psychological and philosophical theories which often informed modernist practices of representation.

Assessment

one 2,000-word essay 40%

tutorial exercises (equivalent 1,000-words) 20%

one 2,000-word essay 40%

Other Details

Levels: Undergraduate
X