Category: Twentieth Century Literature ENGL202

Greetings and farewell from A/Prof Michael Griffith (Literature: Strathfield)

I am retiring after 45 years at ACU. While it certainly sounds a long time, I remember vividly my first days on Castle Hill Campus in 1977 and then the flow of new literature students, through Castle Hill, then Mount Saint Mary and occasionally MacKillop. Every year a wonderful crop of new faces, new enthusiasms!…

The Wonderful World of Blogging in the Twentieth Century Literature Unit for 2020

Congratulations to All of You for Creating such Wonderful Readable Responses to the Wide Range of Questions posted Each Week: Blogging has become a powerful transformative aspect of literary teaching that enables students to not only connect creatively with the energies of the writers that they love, but also to share their own intimate connection…

Concluding Blog Topics for 20th Century Literature 2020

We have started exploring some of the work of those writers who challenge the tyranny of English culture on their own lives, while at the same time demonstrating their passionate commitment to English as an expressive medium. What a paradox! We have found this in M.Nourbese Philip and now in James Joyce. We are going…

T.S.Eliot, literary modernism and the quest for meaning.

T.S.Eliot, right from the start of his career was a passionate seeker for truth. This expressed itself in the metaphor of the journey which runs right through his whole work from “Prufrock” through to “The Four Quartets”. What truth was Eliot seeking? He was clearly living at a time of universal fragmentation, immediately after the…

creativity in time of war

Today we broached the world of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. The focus was on the way the English language became transformed during this period with the direct impact of the horrors of the First World War. The jingoistic idealism of Rupert Brooke was kicked out by the hard hitting, grating, consonantal observation…