English 134

Book List

Friel, Brian: Translations; Greene, Graham: The End of the Affair; Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go; Kennedy, A.L.: Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains; Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook; McEwan, Ian: Atonement; Smith, Zadie: White Teeth

Description

This course will survey British and Irish writing since World War II.  We will dig deeply into the texts' formal and generic workings, and think through the cultural and social contexts from which they emerge. Along the way, we'll consider the period of postwar decolonization and retrenchment, the social and cultural shifts of the 1960s, the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, Thatcherism in the 1980s, the liberal turn in the 1990s and the notion of "Cool Britannia," and issues surrounding race, gender, and nation in the British archipelago in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  Along with the texts listed above, we will read poems by Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, Roy Fisher, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Muldoon, Jackie Kay, Caroline Bergvall, Maggie O'Sullivan, Geoffrey Hill, Grace Nichols, Don Paterson, and Linton Kwesi Johnson.