English 45C

Description

This course will survey a range of modern English-language literature (novels, poetry, and drama), paying particular attention to the ways in which literary form has responded to the rapid social and cultural changes of modernity. These changes include urbanization and globalization, rapid technological growth, the unprecedented violence of two world wars, and shifting definitions of racial, gender, sexual, and national identities. We will give prominence to the early twentieth century artistic movement known as “modernism,” and then trace its reverberations later in the 20th century.

Authors will likely include: Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Chinua Achebe, Don DeLillo. Occasional supplementary critical readings will be made available on bCourses.