English 45C

Book List

Bechdel, Alice: Fun Home; Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw; Joyce, James: Dubliners; Pynchon , Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49; Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea; Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse

Other Readings and Media

Poetry and critical essays will be made available on our bCourses site.

Description

This course will focus on the formal consequences of the cultural and social revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After examining the changes in narrative strategy and poetic diction that have come to be known as "modernism," we will trace their reverberations by examining key texts and genres across the century. We will also analyze the pressures brought to bear on formal innovation by diverse national and ethnic traditions, the legacies of colonialism, the unprecedented violence of two world wars, and the rapid development of technology.