English 443 R SEMINAR IN MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE, Esty. TU 1-2:50
TOPIC: Modernism, Modernity and the Bildungsroman

This seminar will focus on revisions and adaptations of the Bildungsroman by modernist-era writers in Britain. If, as Franco Moretti argues, the nineteenth century novel of education used youth as a master trope to represent dynamic social transformation, then how do twentieth century writers represent the link (or disjunction) between subject formation and political or economic modernization in their time? What kind of allegory connects maturing protagonists to societies that were increasingly considered either hyper-modern or rebarbarized? Does modernism change the Bildungsroman beyond recognition? While our readings and discussions will be guided by these questions, the course will explore a range of issues in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf. In addition, the seminar will offer a critical introduction to some key texts and terms in narrative theory, with an emphasis on genre-based and materialist approaches, but with some attention to formal, psychoanalytic and feminist theories of the novel as well. Critical readings will include selections from Bakhtin, Booth, Brooks, Jameson, Lukacs, Moretti, Showalter and others. We will also read (in translation) Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, a founding text in the Bildungsroman tradition and a touchstone for its subsequent theorization.