Literature Group - Telling Storeys/Trapped

We embark on the second part of the course with a last look at the English country house and the values associated with it in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The house as a metaphor for history (already explored in Troubles) is central to our next book, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation which charts the upheaval of 20thc Germany through the experiences of the occupants of a house in Brandenburg over seven decades. The next three texts relate more specifically to the idea of being trapped, beginning with Camus’s allegory of the absurdity of existence in The Plague, continuing with Kobo Abe’s meditation on the human condition in Woman of the Dunes and ending with I will never see the World again, a book by a novelist which is not a novel but a remarkable prison narrative in which physical entrapment does not negate mental freedom.

19 January     Brideshead Revisited                     Evelyn Waugh

2 February      Visitation                                        Jenny Erpenbeck

16 February    The Plague                                     Albert Camus

2 March          Woman of the Dunes                      Kobo Abe

16 March        I Will Never See The World Again   Ahmet Altan