English 125D

Other Readings and Media

Émile Zola:  La Bête Humaine; Theodor Dreiser:  Sister Carrie; Virginia Woolf:  Mrs. Dalloway; Amos Tutuola:  My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart; William Gibson:  Neuromancer; Kazuo Ishiguro:  Never Let Me Go

Description

This course is a general survey of the 20th century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of expression of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these three thematics, history, modernism and empire. Some questions we will address: how have the vicissitudes of modernity lead to a re-direction of historical narration within the novel; how have modernist aesthetic experimentation re-shaped the very form of the novel and lastly how has the phenomenon of imperialism, the asymmetrical relations of power between center and periphery, widened the scope and influence of fictive milieu.