University of Victoria, Department of English (Winter 2020)
Welcome to the official coursepage for English 480: Alcohol in/and Modernist Fiction. It provides registered UVic students with access to course readings, assignment handouts, and related readings and resources, among other things. For more information about the course or this website, please contact the instructor, Dr. Graham Jensen (ghjensen [at] uvic [dot] ca).
Just to give you a taste of what we’ll be talking about in this course, here’s the official description:
Modernist literature is soaked with booze, as were many of its most prominent authors. But what does the history of alcohol’s production, marketing, and consumption have to do with the history of modernist literary techniques? What might the modernists’ obsession with alcohol tell us about the socio-historical contexts in which they were writing? In this course, we will soberly attempt to answer such questions while reading some famous modernist texts, such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, as well as less-frequently studied works, such as Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend. Throughout, we will also discuss modernist representations of alcohol and alcoholic consumption in relation to an intoxicating array of subjects, including war, the modern city, the emergence of the New Woman, cults of masculinity, prohibition, the romanticization of drinking culture, Jazz, and the Roaring Twenties.