English R1B

Book List

Hacker, Diana: Rules for Writers; Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse

Other Readings and Media

Also a course reader with selections from W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and W. H. Auden.

Description

The early twentieth century was peculiarly preoccupied with its own modernity. While science and technology made great strides forward, two World Wars left devastation, and writers struggled to portray the tumult of a swiftly changing social landscape.  Somehow, to them, subjective human experience seemed objectively different.

But in such shifting waters, how can we know how much we actually know?  What exactly is the difference between fact and opinion?  Do art and literature create objective knowledge?  In the 1910s and '20s, while some argued that art should become scientific, others valued a newly radical ambiguity in creative expression.  This course will examine how subjectivity and objectivity operate together in language.  You will use original research to develop progressively longer papers, ultimately completing 32 pages of writing in drafts as well as revisions.