Upcoming Events: Modern March

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I took a week or so off to recover from January's efforts; I was a little blogged out, and now I have a pile of things to write about.  First, there are lots of fun things coming up--


Allie at A Literary Odyssey is hosting a Classics Club event in March and it's all about the modern literature.  Not modern as in written in the last 20 years, but the Modernist movement.  Allie says:
it generally refers to literature written between the very late 19th century and the halfway point of the 20th century. In general, Modernist writers experimented with style, form, and theme. They broke away from the traditional viewpoints found in literature until that point and strove to focus on the darker and more unpleasant sides of life. This is also the time period where stream-of-consciousness made its roaring appearance.

Some of the big writers of the Modernist period were:
  • William Faulkner
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Ezra Pound
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Samuel Beckett
  • Gertrude Stein
  • e e cummings
  • T.S.Eliot
  • James Joyce
There are more, of course, but those are the heavy hitters of the period and those most closely associated with the movement.

Allie says she's not all that comfortable with the moderns, and that makes me happy because neither am I.  Of these listed authors, I like Fitzgerald OK--well, The Great Gatsby--I haven't read anything else.   For the rest of them, I've mostly read one thing by each and not liked it much.  I have been known to enjoy Forster!   So I'm not going to get terribly ambitious here and sign up for 5 books, but I do know what I'm going to do: I'm going to try to read and study and maybe even grasp a little bit of "The Wasteland" by T. S. Eliot.  If that goes well, I'll move on to "The Hollow Men," and for dessert I might read Murder in the Cathedral.

Also, I have no idea why the text background is acting up, so please forgive.

Comments

  1. AmyFebruary 17, 2013 at 6:43 AM

    I'm looking forward to your thoughts on The Wasteland. I am a poetry lover, but have tried and failed to get into Eliot. Not trying to discourage you--on the contrary, I'm encouraging you to dig in and help me see what I'm missing. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFebruary 25, 2013 at 12:55 AM

    I will be reading T.S. Eliot's the Love Poem of J Alfred Prufrock for the event. I'm not familiar with either Eliot or poetry in general, so it should be interesting. Look forward to hearing what you think about The Wasteland.

    ReplyDelete

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