English 227 - Modern British Fiction
Jefferson Hunter
MWF 10:00-10:50

“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  English fiction in the first half of the twentieth century.  Without ever quite 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.  The important modern theme of civilization and its discontents will surface in 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.  We’ll finish the course with a contemporary novel (probably Ian McEwan’s Saturday) to give a sense of perspective, and with an additional novel chosen by the class.  There will be occasional readings in criticism and commentary, much of it by the novelists themselves; also a few reading assignments on the Internet.  But the emphasis will be on the fiction.  Writing assignments: some short exercises, two papers, and a final examination.  In class I’ll lecture informally, ask a lot of questions, and encourage discussion whenever it seems called for.  There are no prerequisites and non-majors are welcome.