English 45C

Book List

Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Coetzee, JM: Disgrace; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Mieville, China: The Last Days of New Paris; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway

Other Readings and Media

There will also be a required course reader containing writings by: Matthew Arnold, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, TS Eliot, WH Auden, Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, Caroline Bergvall, Susan-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill and others.

Description

This course will survey British, American, and global Anglophone literature from the end of the 19^th century through the beginning of the 21^st. Moving across a number of genres and movements, this course will examine the ways 20^th- and 21^st-century writers have used literary form to represent, question, and even produce different aspects of modernity. Particular attention will be paid to close reading and key concepts in literary study, as well as literature’s broader engagements with questions of race, gender and sexuality, colonialism, religion, mass media, economy, and ecology.  Evaluation will be based on two papers, a midterm, and a final exam.

Readings will likely include: fiction by James Weldon Johnson, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Salman Rushdie, Alison Bechdel, JM Coetzee, and China Mieville; drama by Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Beckett, Susan-Lori Parks, and Caryl Churchill; poetry by Matthew Arnold, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, TS Eliot, and Caroline Bergvall among others.