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This seminar is a bit of nostalgia, looking back to the time when I started out as a student and literary scholar. But it is more than that, as the 1980s were a time of immense importance for British literature. Postmodernism really took off, and some of the works written at the time were momentous for the decades to come. By now, some of these authors have died, the others have become the grand old writers of our times with long lists of novels and awards to their names, but in the 1980s their works were fresh and exciting, irreverent and innovative. We will certainly read Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and Graham Swift’s Waterland. In addition, we may read Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, Angla Carter’s Nights at the Circus, David Lodge’s Small World, Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, or Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden.
For MA students this is part of the 10-credit module Literary History together with the lecture on Modernism in collaboration with James Dowthwaite. |
