Syllabus
1. Franz Kafka. Anna Akhmatova. Alienation. A journey to the heart of modern humanity.
2. Marcel Proust. Virginia Woolf. Modernism and the experimental use of time.
3. Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Politics and literature.
4. George Orwell and Clive Staples Lewis. Science fiction, dystopia, and utopia.
5. Graham Greene and William Golding. The Other Side of Humanity.
6. Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The Beat Generation.
7. J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin. The Return of Myth.
8. Mikhail Bulgakov. Chingiz Aitmatov. Magical Realism.
9. Kazuo Ishiguro. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Transculturalism.
10. Herta Müller and Laurent Binet. History as inspiration.
Annotation
The lecture offers an introduction to the canon of European literature and its development over the last 100 years. In several in-depth probes it creates an outline which allows the students to understand the transformations of poetics, themes and key genres of the 20th and 21st centuries and selected works of the most prominent authors.