"The novel tells a story," E. M. Forster once wrote, and then added plaintively "I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different..."  In this course we'll study eight writers who transformed the English novel in the first half of the twentieth century.  Without ever abandoning the novel's traditional commitment to storytelling, they together sought to make it "something different"--an exploration of the interior life, an attack on the "old stable ego of character" (D.H. Lawrence), a re-ordering of time, a counterpointing of civilization and savagery, an "elegy" (Virginia Woolf), a rendering in words of what the new art of the cinema was doing with images and sounds.

We'll begin with three novels -- Forster's Howards End, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway--which in a mere fifteen years show a remarkable shift from narrative omniscience to the stream-of-consciousness; after that, look at the development of the modern short story in the work of Katherine Mansfield.  The important modern theme of civilization and its discontents we'll examine in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Lawrence's Women in Love, and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust; the anxieties and uncertainties of the period just before World War II in Woolf's Between the Acts; and the dislocations and moral upheavals of the war itself in Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear and The End of the Affair.  The course will finish with an additional novel chosen by the class.  There will be occasional readings in criticism and commentary, much of it by the novelists themselves.

Writing assignments: a few short ungraded exercises, a two-page paper, a longer essay, a midterm, a final examination.  In class I'll lecture informally, ask a lot of questions, and encourage discussion whenever it seems called for.  No prerequisites.