Code 21676
Level of study Third/Final year
Credit value 20
Semester 2
Pre-requisite modules You must have completed at least two years of appropriate study in this discipline
This module introduces students to one of the key modernist writers, and one whose work is widely perceived as among the most `difficult'. Students will be required to read widely in Eliot's poetry, prose and drama, with a view to finding links and mutual illumination between these different writings, and discovering the consistencies in his outlook that can make that work more graspable. The module will consider chronologically the poetry from Prufrock (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), as well as a range of Eliot's literary and cultural criticism, and the drama of the 1930s. It will consider a range of Eliot's sources, some key interpretative debates his work has provoked, Eliot's `Englishness', the anti-Semitic controversy surrounding the work and the relations between his classicism, Christianity and cultural theorising.