English 45C

Book List

Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot; DeLillo, Don: White Noise; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway

Other Readings and Media

Critical essays as well as poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats and others will be made available on bCourses.

Description

This course will survey a range of English-language works spanning more than a century, examining the upheavals in literary forms during this period in relation to their historical and socio-political contexts. We will give prominence to the modernist movement of the early twentieth century, considering its formal experiments as a set of responses - sometimes elegiac, sometimes celebratory, often alienated - to a rapidly changing world. This was a world that was urbanized and industrialized in new and unprecedented ways, torn apart by two world wars, and grappling with the legacies of colonialism. It was also a world of new technologies that altered the experience of space and time, and one where traditional social divisions - along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and national identity - were being redrawn. Our guiding questions will include: what is the relationship between literature and history? How do form and content interact in literary works? What does literature tell us about our conceptions of the self and of others?

Assignments will likely include 3 papers and a final.