English 125D

Book List

Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Gibson, William: Neuromancer; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway; Zola, Emile: La Bete Humaine;

Recommended: Culler, Jonathan: Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Description

This course is a general survey of the 20th-century novel. The novel is the quintessential form of experession of modernity and modern subjectivity. In this survey of key works of the century, we will explore the novel form as it is framed by these three thematics—history, modernism, and empire. These are some questions we will address: How have the vicissitudes of modernity led to a re-direction of historical narratiion within the novel? How has modernist aesthetic experimentation re-shaped the very form of the novel? And lastly, how has the phenomenon of imperialism, the asymmetrical relations of power between center and periphery, widened the scope of fictive milieu?

Please note the changes (made on May 17) in the book list, above.