Over the past ten years, quite a number of British novels have been received as instances of a return to, or at least an engagement with literary modernism. Nicola Barker, Tom McCarthy, Will Self and Zadie Smith have all published fiction that is regularly described as evincing this perceived neo-, retro-, or metamodernism. Critics and reviewers use terms like “avant-garde”, “Futurist,” “Woolfian” and “stream-of-consciousness” to categorise and evaluate the experimental works of these authors. This raises questions about the value, status and function of concepts associated with modernism, the state of literary criticism and the future of the British novel. Do authors like McCarthy and Self imitate the historical avant-garde? Or are they labelled “avant-garde” because they are ahead of their contemporaries? A new and exciting Radboud research project, devoted to topical questions like these, aims to chart the use of modernist terms in the reception of twenty-first-century British fiction.    

This course offers students the opportunity to participate in current research and contribute to the understanding of the complex relation between contemporary British fiction and the legacy of literary modernism. With its focus on literary criticism, the positioning of the author in the literary field and the use of branding by publishers, The Imitation Game echoes and builds on various emphases of the programme "Literair Bedrijf." The first part will consist of a series of seminars that will introduce students to the metamodernism debate and its relevance to the case study of British fiction and its reception as well as to the theory and practice of criticism and reviewing. Students will be assigned a recent British novel and investigate its reception as well as its author's self-presentation in small research groups. Groups will present their results in a final plenary session or mini-symposium that will conclude the course.