English 45C

Other Readings and Media

"James, H.: The Portrait of a Lady; Eliot, T.S: The Waste Land and Other Poems; Stevens, W.: The Palm at the End of the Mind; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse; Hurston, Z.: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Beckett, S.: Waiting for Godot; Plath, S.: Ariel; Pynchon, T.: The Crying of Lot 49; a Course reader (available from Odin Copy).



Recommended Text: Frye, Northrop, et al., eds.: The Harper Handbook to Literature "

Description

"In surveying British and American literature from 1865-1965, this course will focus on what may be called the modernist tradition of innovation. We will study authors--such as Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett--whose revolutionary experiments in form established a new orthodoxy of representation: the belief that to write literature is to reinvent literature. Our study of literary form will lead us to engage larger socio-literary issues such as the relationship between high art and mass culture; the redefinition of national identity entailed by expatriatism; the search by cultural minorities for their own literary traditions and ""voices""; and the role of academic literary criticism in canon formation. "