English 45C

Other Readings and Media

Beckett,  S.: Waiting for Godot; Eliot,  T.S.: Selected Poems; Faulkner,  W: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston,  Z: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Joyce,  J: Dubliners; Woolf,  V: 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 drifts. In addition to the texts listed, we will read poems by Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Stein, Stevens, Moore, H.D., Hughes, and Auden. There will be two essays, a final exam, and (perhaps) a mid-term.