New Website for “Alcohol in/and Modernist Fiction” (Engl 480)

I’ve just launched the official coursepage for English 480: Alcohol in/and Modernist Fiction, which I designed and will be teaching at the University of Victoria in Winter 2020. The website will be updated frequently between now and January 2020, but it already contains some basic information about proposed course readings and assignments, as well as links to a number of relevant readings and student resources.

Just to give you a taste of what’s to come, here’s the official course 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.

For more information as well as future updates, please visit the website.