English 45C

Book List

Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Morrison, Toni: Jazz; Ramazani, Jahan: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Third Edition), Vol. 1; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse

Description

This course examines radical changes and unexpected continuities in literature in English from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.  We will read poetry and fiction from Britain, Ireland, North America, and Africa in order to explore a range of literary responses to different aspects of modernity, such as urbanization, colonialism, and popular culture. We approach these texts in a variety of ways: we will consider them as belonging to different modes (realism, naturalism, modernism, postmodernism); we will think about them as producing new kinds of narrative and poetic form; and we will read them closely.