English 45C

Book List

Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady; Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita; Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway

Other Readings and Media

Poems and other supplementary texts by Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, and Sylvia Plath will be made available on bSpace.

Description

This course examines a range of British and American texts from the period with an emphasis on literary history and its social and political contexts. We will focus on the emergence, development, and legacy of modernism as a set of formal innovations that show us some of the most provocative ways that literature operated as a means of cultural response in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  We will also consider modernism alongside other literary modes and styles (realism, naturalism, postmodernism) that look to different strategies for representing the experience of the modern world—and of finding a place for literature within it. Particular attention will be paid to close reading and questions of literary form even as we think about such larger issues as the relationship between reading and entertainment, the changing status of art in respect to new technologies of information and representation, and the challenges to traditional conceptions of the self posed by new languages of psychological, national, and racial identity. Assignments will likely include two short papers, a midterm and a final.

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