English 45C

Book List

Eliot, T.S.: Selected Poems; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway

Description

This course will survey British, Irish, and American literature from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. We will try to evoke some of the key aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political trends that characterized the movements of modernity as we closely investigate a selection of the major texts from this sprawling period. At times the lectures will zoom in on particular features of texts, and at other times they will zoom out to cultural conditions and aesthetic tendencies. In addition to the books listed, there will be a small reader with texts by Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Stein, Stevens, Moore, H.D., Hughes, Auden, and Beckett. There will be two essays, and a final exam.

Please note that this class will first meet on Wednesday, September 4; discussion sections will not start being held until Friday, September 6.