I’m very excited to be teaching this course at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution. The course is outlined in detail below. There are limited places available so if you wish to book, contact HLSI on 020 8340 3343 asap. HLSI is close to Archway and Highgate Tubes and easily reached by bus. Further information about other courses and events at HLSI here.
Europe, Europe: European Literature in Translation 1919-1939
Some of the books I’ve read this year in preparation. Full syllabus below.
This course is aimed at those who are interested in studying the forms and languages of literature, and who wish to explore literary texts within the broader culture and histories of a particular period. The period between 1919 and 1939 was particularly rich and exciting in European fiction, poetry and drama, shaped by the continuing desire to capture modernity, conceived in a range of often conflicting ways. It was also moulded by cross-fertilisations in/with music, art, cinema, radio, and the many genres of mass print culture.
This complexity was shaped by the political and economic turmoil of the inter-war period in Europe. Germany and Austro-Hungary were grappling with war defeat and the end of Empires, as well as the physical and psychological impacts of the Great War. Italy was one of the Allied victors but disappointed with its ‘spoils’ and plunged into political crisis, almost immediately after the end of the war. The whole of Europe was transfixed by the Soviet ‘experiment’. The development of Fascisms in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 30s were fostered by complex contexts, including hostility and scepticism towards modern mass democracy and the instabilities and insecurities produced by international economic and financial crises. Writers in this period engaged directly with political and economic questions. Joseph Roth (author of The Radetsky March) was a remarkable journalist of the post-war period. Other writers found ways of ways of representing their anger or dissatisfaction with repressive regimes in various coded or not so coded forms, for example, Bertolt Brecht, Federico Garcia Lorca, and the Italian women writers – such as Ada Negri, Carola Prosperi, Pia Rimini – who wrote stories in the Italian popular press and hid their criticisms of women’s place ‘in plain sight’. A number of these writers were political refugees or victims of the regimes they wrote, for example Anna Gmeyner (Manja) and Ignazio Silone (author of Bread and Wine). The course focuses on two geographical areas: Germany and Austria in the Autumn term, and Italy in the Spring Term. In the short Summer term, we will take two reading excursions, the first to Spain with Lorca, the second to France with George Simenon.
Students will need to buy or borrow copies of the primary texts listed below. Apart from a course outline at the beginning of each term, students will be sent an outline by email before the class which includes general information about the author and text, further online reading and listening, and some questions to think about which suggest directions for our class discussion. The aim of this is to create a common starting point for all. We’ll use the class for a mixture of activities including reading aloud from the primary texts, close textual analysis and wider discussions which compare and contrast texts, topics and contexts.
You will need to be willing to use online resources such as BBC iplayer and BBC Sounds, YouTube etc. The list of texts below is not yet finally confirmed. Texts are listed below in the order in which we’ll be reading them.
Autumn Term: Germany and Austria
Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March (1932) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2016 translated by Joachim Neugroschel)
Irmgaud Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl (1932) (Penguin Classics, March 2019, translated by Kathie Von Ankum)
Anna Gmeyner – Manja (1939) (Persephone Books, translated by Kate Phillips)
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939) (Vintage Classics, 1989)
Bertolt Brecht The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941) (Methuen 1981, translated by R. Manheim); poems and extracts about political theatre – to be supplied as photocopy.
Spring Term: Italy
Jamie McKendrick, 20th Century Italian Poems. Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Umberto Saba and others (Faber and Faber, 2004, translated by various)
Maria Robin Pickering-Lazzi ed., Unspeakable Women, Selected Short Stories Written by Women During Fascism. Stories by Grazia Deledda, who won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1926, Luisa Astaldi, Gianna Manzini, Ada Negri, Carola Prosperi, Pia Rimini, and Clarice Tartufari (Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993, translated by various)
Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine (1936) (Signet Classics, 2008, translated by Eric Mossbacher)
Alberto Moravia, Agostino (1944) or possibly another Moravia novel depending on availability (NYRB, 2014, translated by Michael F. Moore)
Summer Term
Spain and France
Federico Garcia Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba and Other Plays (1936) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2001 translated by Christopher Maurer
George Simenon, The Krull House (1939) (Penguin 2018, translated by Howard Curtis)
Secondary Reading
Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Bodley Head, 2012)
Michael R Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (CUP, 2014)
Richard J Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin 2012)
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968) (Norton, 2001)
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (Abacus, 1995)
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane A. Goldman, Olga Taxidou eds., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh University Press, 1998)
Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the 20th Century (Abacus, 2002)
About the tutor
Rachel Malik is a writer and a reader. Her first novel, Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize (2018) and she is currently working on her second. In a previous life, she was a university lecturer in English Literature.