English 45C

Other Readings and Media

The book list for this course has not been finalized, but will include several of the following titles: Douglass, F.: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Stevenson, R.L.: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness; Forster, E.M.: Howards End; West, N.: The Day of the Locust; Dangarembga, T.: Nervous Conditions; Ng, F.: Bone. There will also be a course reader containing stories by Melville, Poe, and Rushdie; poems by Tennyson, Dickinson, Hardy, Eliot, Yeats, Bennett, Walcott, Rich, and Dabydeen; plays by Wilde and Soyinka; and criticism by Arnold, DuBois, Eliot, Woolf, and Ghosh.

Description

In this semester we will cut a selective path through a vast swathe of literature in English from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Our aim is less to survey the ?greatest hits? of the period than to get a feel for and analytical grasp of patterns of continuity and change in the history of English literature. Yet in many ways this will be as much a course in literary geography as in literary history: one of our key tasks will be to trace the transformation of English into a worldwide literary language.