Literature: You Must Read These Books - Twentieth Century European Literature

If you’re tired of the parochial quality of much British fiction in the last 50 years, often described as the Hampstead Divorce Novel, then this course offers you something different and intellectually stimulating, investigating as it does the very real issues of confronting historical memory in Europe, still negotiating with the displacement and terror of World War Two and the former Soviet Bloc.

This course will enable you to discover the complications of memory and how we tell stories to ourselves and others to arrive at provisional truths and uncertain identities. The majority of these texts are moving, while at the same time illustrating the persistence of the human spirit or what one will. We will encounter questions relating to the individual versus society, the binary conflict of good versus evil and the struggle for emancipation, especially regarding the position of women.

The course will also introduce you to the manner in which we construct history and determine our own existences, sometimes living comfortably with the false narratives we tell ourselves, which may be a means to survive in a time of shifting political philosophies. There is much to be enjoyed in these authors, many of whom may be new to you.