English 45C

Other Readings and Media

Tentative book list: Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Eliot, T. S.: The Waste Land ; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse ; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Nabokov, V.: Lolita ; Beckett, S.: Endgame ; Morrison, T.: Beloved ; McEwan, I.: Atonement; a course pack with a few poems and short stories

Description

Some works of literature this professor believes you absolutely must read before you graduate, also known as a survey of British and American literature in the last century. We will investigate forms, techniques, ideas, cultural context, and intertextuality. Special attention will be paid to questions of aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics—what is beautiful? how do we know? what ought we do?—as they develop in the West during the course of the twentieth century.