English 45C

Other Readings and Media

Conrad, J: Heart of Darkness; Yeats, W.B.: Selected Poems; Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land & Other Poems; Joyce, J.: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Faulkner, W.: The Sound and the Fury; Lawrence, T.E.: Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Woolf, V.: To the Lighthouse; Beckett, S.: Murphy; a course reader with selections from Hopkins, G.M.; Pound, E.; Williams, W.C.

Description

"This course is an introduction to modernism, the period in literary history that Perry Anderson has called a ""portmanteau concept,"" and that we might likewise today frustratedly conclude was a suitcase of largely failed aesthetic and political impulses. Given the survey nature of this lecture, we will outline in broad strokes some of the constitutive moments of several Anglo-American modernisms from among the work of Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, T.E. Lawrence, Woolf, Williams, Pound, Faulkner, and Beckett. We will pay considerable attention to doing close literary and cultural readings of these texts and will ask probing questions of form and function. Course requirements include three papers, a midterm, and a final exam, and active participation in lectures and discussion sections.



Note: Given the extensive use of literary history and intertextuality by most of the figures we will be reading, students are strongly urged to have completed 45A and 45B prior to enrolling in this course. "