E. M. Forster: The Novels

E.M. Forster’s place within British literary history is remarkable, not least because of his work’s stubborn tendency towards the decidedly unremarkable. Forster is now mostly remembered as a novelist – especially since the release of popular film adaptations of his books in the 1980s and 90s – even though he wrote five out of six of his novels before the age of thirty-five, never published another novel after A Passage of India (1924), and spent the later decades of his life as a critic, lecturer, radio broadcaster, and something of a ‘national treasure’. Forster knew and was friends with many notable figures of the British modernist avant-garde (he was part of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’), while his own work was and is considered by both his contemporaries and today’s readers and critics to lack, for the most part at least, the formal and psychological vigour and innovative drive of properly ‘modernist’ literature. Politically speaking, too, Forster sits on the fence between a certain cultural conservatism and a progressive, sometimes even proto-socialist outlook, mostly acting as a public proponent of a rather tame liberal humanism. Realising his own inclination towards same-sex desire at a fairly young age, he became friends with gay socialist philosopher Edward Carpenter and, inspired by Carpenter’s relationship with his working-class lover George Merrill, wrote one of the first novels in English that gave two gay protagonists the chance to have a happy ending – but the book, Maurice, was not published until after Forster’s death.

In this course, we will be reading and discussing four of Forster’s novels and contextualise them within the wider cultural context of their writing. In a sense, all of Forster’s works are thought experiments contrasting different human types, worldviews, and political stances, and his protagonists have to decide which path to follow. Lucy Honeychurch, in A Room with a View, for example, must choose between English Puritanism and the aesthetic intellectualism of Cecil Vyse, and the (sexual) freedom of Italy and the liberal spirit of George Emerson. Howards End contrasts the intellectual bohemia of the Schlegel sisters with the economic materialism of the Wilcoxes, and Margaret’s attempt to ‘only connect’ the two worldviews gives the novel its motto. As such, Forster’s works also all reflect larger social tensions between, for instance, the city and the country, industrialised and rural landscapes, the position (and hypocrisies) of the middle classes in Edwardian England, irreconcilable class differences, and the disastrous personal and social consequences of colonialism.
 

Please note:

Personal attendance during the first session is mandatory to maintain enrolment status. Please direct all your inquiries about vacancies to britlit.fragen.fk15@tu-dortmund.de.

The course starts in the second week (18.10.23).

E. M. Forster. A Room With a View (Penguin Classics)

E. M. Forster. Howard’s End (Penguin Classics)

E. M. Forster. Maurice (Penguin Classics)

E. M. Forster. A Passage to India (Penguin Classics)

Credits will be awarded on the basis of either:

• a term paper
• project
• ‘Aktive Teilnahme’