English 45C

Book List

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

Other Readings and Media

Other readings will be posted on the bCourses site, under “Resources.”

Description

This course examines radical changes and unexpected continuities in literature in English from 1850 to (almost) the present.  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.

This course will also form an introduction to the concepts and critical tools used to analyze literature. We will approach the 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.