The Modern World: Ten Great Writers — Season 1, Episode 11: Ten Great Writers: The Seminar

Episode synopsis

In this lively round-table discussion, moderator Melvyn Bragg; the late writer and critic Anthony Burgess; Professor George Steiner, author of Language and Silence; literary critic Hermione Lee; and writer and series consultant Professor Malcolm Bradbury debate what constitutes modernist writing. New literary themes generated by the era’s political and social upheavals are also discussed, including time, the unconscious mind, alienation, the changing role of women, and the consequences of two world wars. In addition, the panel suggests that the atrocities of the post-modern world led writers to reject modernist narrative techniques and seek a new syntax and vocabulary.

About The Modern World: Ten Great Writers

This documentary series uses drama and commentary to shed light on the lives and works of Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Luigi Pirandello, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.

More episodes from Season 1

• E1James Joyce: Ulysses
• E2Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent
• E3Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'
• E4Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu
• E5Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
• E6Henrik Ibsen: The Master Playwright
• E7Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
• E8Luigi Pirandello: In Search of an Author
• E9T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
• E10Franz Kafka: The Trial