English 45C

Book List

Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Morrison, Toni: Jazz; Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings ; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse

Other Readings and Media

An electronic course reader will make poetry, drama, and critical prose available.

Description

This course will focus on the formal consequences of the social and cultural revolutions of the early twentieth century. We will examine the changes in narrative strategy and voice and the transformations of poetic syntax and diction that have come to be known as "modernism" and will trace their reverberations through the later twentieth century. We will also be attentive to the pressures brought to bear on formal innovation by different national traditions and histories of colonialism, racism, and feminism.