Lect. dr.

Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com

UNIT 1
COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CLIMATE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

! All course and seminar requirements can be found here: https://literature20c.wordpress.com/

I. COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Final Grade = 50% seminar grade + 50% final exam

The final exam is oral and it will assess students’ knowledge of the literary works in the bibliography along
with an understanding of the critical interpretations discussed at the course and at the seminar.

+ See final examination topics HERE: https://literature20c.wordpress.com/examination-topics/

In order to acquire a pass, students must have a seminar grade of at least 5 and a final exam grade of
at least 5. They must have read the works listed in the mandatory bibliography.

Attending the lectures is not compulsory, but students are encouraged to actively participate in order to
receive a bonus of 1 point for the final exam.

Bibliography

Fiction
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness (1899)
James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
D.H. Lawrence – Women in Love (1920)
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
John Fowles – The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
David Lodge – Small World (1984)

Drama
Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot (1952)
Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (1966)
Peter Shaffer – Equus (1973)

Poetry
T.S. Eliot – “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), “The Waste Land” (Canto I)(1922)
W.B Yeats – “The Second Coming” (1919), “Leda and the Swan” (1923), “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928) W.
H. Auden – “Who’s Who” (1934), “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1939), “The Unknown Citizen” (1939) Stevie
Smith – “Our Bog is Dood” (1950),“Not Waving, But Drowning” (1957), “Was He Married?” (1960) Ted
Hughes – “Theology” (1961), “Crow’s First Lesson” (1970), “Crow Blacker Than Ever” (1970) Seamus
Heaney – “Bogland” (1969), “Punishment” (1975)

Essay
T.S. Eliot – “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921)
Virginia Woolf – “Modern Fiction” (1921)
Martin Esslin – “The Theatre of the Absurd” (1960)
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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com

Further reading (optional):

David Lodge – “The Stream of Consciousness” (from The Art of Fiction, 1992)
David Lodge – “Interior Monologue” (from The Art of Fiction, 1992)
Dennis Brown – The Modernist Self in Twentieth Century English Literature (1989)
Peter Gay – Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (2007)
Ihab Hassan – The Postmodern Turn (1986)
Steven Connor – Postmodernist Culture (1989)
M.H. Abrams – A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957)

II. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CLIMATE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

British rulers in C20: (after Queen Victoria’s 64 year reign 1837-1901) Edward VII (1901-1910), George V
(1910-1936), Edward VIII (1936), George VI (1936-1952), Elisabeth II (1952-present)
End of C19 and Beginning of C20
- Britain is the richest, most powerful and civilized nation in Europe
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and his The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)
- scientific worldview, British positivist philosophy, empiricism, science and facts
- Freudian psychoanalysis
- exponential growth and development of cities

Important Technological Inventions

- modern transportation: the railway system, personal cars, the airplane
- cinematography (the Lumière brothers, Paris 1895)
- the gramophone (1887) (“She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,/And puts a record on the gramophone”
– T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”); the radio (1903); the TV (1927) => mass circulation of information
- the first electronic programable computer (1943): the Colossus helped the British decipher encrypted German
Enigma messages during WWII

The First World War (1914-1918)

- June 28th 1914: Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated
- The Triple Alliance (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy (which switched sides) and later the
Ottoman Empire) vs. The Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, Russia and later Italy and the US)
- technological innovations, great loss of life => calling into questions notions of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’
- feeling of mourning and loss => war memorials
- loss of stability, focus on disintegration, loss of faith, worldwide moral and psychological crisis

Interwar Period
- Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Creation of USSR
- economic instability: 1929 Wall Street Crashes; banks collapse
- rise of right-wing, nationalist parties which promised economic help: Benito Mussolini’s Fascism (started in
1922), Adolf Hitler’s Nazism (started in 1933) => totalitarianism though dictators whose charisma attracts
followers who regard them as prophets and saviors

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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com

The Second World War (1939-1945)

- Germany invades Poland, so Great Britain and France declare war on Germany (the Allies are reunited
against a common enemy)
- WWII is fought between the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France and later USA and USSR) and the Axis
Powers (Germany, Italy and later Japan)
- unprecedented carnage => more that 60 million people die (including 6 million Jews in the Holocaust)
- nuclear weapons for mass destruction (USA drops the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,
ending the war)
- results of the war: at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the victors divided Europe and particularly Germany
(the country was split into four zones under the control of America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union and
the city of Berlin was also split into the communist East and capitalist West – the Soviet blockade and the
Berlin Wall 1961-1989)

The Cold War (1947-1991)

- the term ‘cold war’ was coined by George Orwell in a 1945 essay entitled “You and the Atom Bomb” in
which he predicted the formation of “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by
which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.”
- ideological conflict (capitalism vs. communism) and global nuclear arms race between USA and the Soviet
Union

Modernism and Modernity

MODERNITY or the Modern Age - a period that extended from the seventeenth century and continued into
the twentieth century. The focus was on man’s awareness of himself as rational being, which allows him to
have control over others and nature. This attitude was stressed during the Enlightenment, which saw the world
as rational, ordered and objective.
- associated with reason, capitalism, progress, industrialization, technologization (new modes of
transportation, new media, new materials), mechanization, mass production and mass consumption
(encouraged through advertising; not just the upper class, but the majority of people could afford to buy
consumer goods) => the optimist belief that the contemporary period is the most advanced one.
- the root of the word “modern” is the Latin modo = current.

MODERNISM is an aesthetic avant-garde movement of the twentieth century that springs from modernity,
but also reacts against it => it rebels against reason and it no longer believes blindly in the progress of
humankind and the centrality of man in the universe: “The starting point of Modernism is the crisis of belief
that pervades twentieth century western culture: loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration,
and the shattering of cultural symbols and norms. At the centre of this crisis were the new technologies and
methodologies of science…The rationalism of science and philosophy attacked the validity of traditional
religious and artistic symbols while the growing technology of the industrialized world produced the
catastrophes of war on the one hand and the atomization of human beings on the other.” (Susan Stanford
Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 1981)

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