HLI 312 Modern Literature

In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers'mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.

In James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, first published in 2001, a leading scholar approaches the entire Joycean canon through the concept of'egoism'. This concept, Jean-Michel Rabaté argues, runs throughout Joyce's work, and involves and incorporates its opposite,'hospitality', a term Rabaté understands as meaning an ethical and linguistic opening to'the other'. For Rabaté both concepts emerge from the fact that Joyce published crucial texts in the London based review The Egoist and later moved on to forge strong ties with the international Paris avant-garde. Rabaté examines the theoretical debates surrounding these connections, linking Joyce's engagement with Irish politics with the aesthetic aspects of his texts. Through egoism, he shows, Joyce defined a literary sensibility founded on negation; through hospitality, Joyce postulated the creation of a new, utopian readership. Rabaté explores Joyce's complex negotiation between these two poles in a study of interest to all Joyceans and scholars of modernism.

This book offers a detailed discussion of Conrad's most brilliant and problematic work. Many significant aspects of Heart of Darkness are examined, from plot and characterisation to imagery and symbolism, and particular attention is paid to its ambiguity and paradoxes. By relating the text to a variety of contexts, Cedric Watts explores Conrad's central preoccupations as a writer and as a commentator on his age. The first edition of this study appeared in 1977, and reviewers described it as 'criticism of the highest order' (Joseph Conrad Today) and 'an important book' (Conradiana).

In Modernism and Eugenics, first published in 2001, Donald Childs shows how Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of race improvement and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. Childs traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One's Own, The Waste Land and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. The language of eugenics moves, he claims, between public discourse and personal perspectives. It informs Woolf's theorization of woman's imagination; in Eliot's poetry, it pictures as a nightmare the myriad contemporary eugenical threats to humankind's biological and cultural future. And for Yeats, it becomes integral to his engagement with the occult and his commitment to Irish Nationalism. This is an interesting study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.

Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read, writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like'The Metamorphosis'and The Trial for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. Some might say that Kafka's enduring achievement has been to make his readers love being perplexed. As much of Kafka's writing is designed to perplex the reader, this guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's text and to realize what the uses of such perplexity might be. The book guides readers through their first encounters with Kafka and introduces the problems involved in reading his texts, the nature of his texts from the key novels and novellas to letters and professional writings, his life as a writer and different approaches to reading Kafka.

Home and homelessness (Aleksandr Blok and Mikhail Bulgakov) / Vladimir Lakshin -- From Salon to Samizdat / Violetta Gudkova -- Nikolka Turbin and the Bulgakov brothers (from the family archive) / Elena Zemskaya -- Bulgakov, Stalin and autocracy / A. Colin Wright -- 'Days of the Turbins' by Mikhail Bulgakov in the light of the Russian-Ukranian literary discussion / Maria Popovich -- Nationalism, anti-semitism and Bulgakov / Lesley Milne -- Mikhail Afanasievich and the Sergei Paphnutieviches / Grigory Faiman -- Reality and illusion : duality in Bulgakov's theatre plays / Barbara Henry -- 'Fatal eggs' and 'Adam and Eve' : disruption and restoration of the natural order / Phyllis W. powell -- Story "morphine" : an attempt at analysis in the context of Bulgakov's creative biography / Marianne Gourg -- Gospel according to Woland and the tradition of the wandering Jew / Malcolm V. Jones -- "Pilatism" in Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The master and Margarita' / Donald Fiene --Bulgakov's theatre plays / Barbara Henry -- Fatal eggs and Adam and Eve : disruption and restoration of the natural order / Phyllis W. powell -- Story "morphine" : an attempt at analysis in the context of Bulgakov's creative biography / Marianne Gourg -- Gospel according to Woland and the tradition of the wandering Jew / Malcolm V. Jones -- "Pilatism" in Mikhail Bulgakov's The master and Margarita / Donald Fiene.
Role and meaning of madness in 'The master and Margarita : the novel as a Doppelgänger tale / Matt F. Oja -- Dreamers and dreaming in M.A. Bulgakov's 'The master and Margarita' / Riitta H. Puttman -- Meaning of music and musical images in the works of Mikhail Bulgakov / Nadine Natov -- Giving the devil his due : the register of voices in 'The master and Margarita' and in York Höller's operatic adaptation of the novel / Nathalie M. Talbot -- Tragic irony of fame / Kalpana Sahni -- Diaboliad -- Kafkiad? / Alena Moravkova -- Bulgakov themes and characters in the works of Soviet writers / Nina Baranova -- Masters of the satanic : Mikhail Bulgakov, Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco / Nina Baranova -- Devil of a similarity : 'The satanic verses' and 'Master i Margarita' / Arnold McMillin.