English 45C

Description

This course examines a range of British and American texts from the period with an emphasis on literary history and its social and political contexts. We will focus on the emergence, development, and legacy of modernism as a set of formal innovations that help us see how literature operates as a means of cultural response in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will also consider modernism alongside other literary modes and styles (realism, naturalism, postmodernism) that pursue different strategies for representing the experience of the world—and for finding a place for literature within it. Particular attention will be paid to close reading and questions of literary form even as we think about such larger issues as the relationship between reading and entertainment, the changing status of art in respect to new technologies of information and representation, and the challenges to traditional conceptions of the self that are posed by new languages of psychological, national, and racial identity.

Featured authors will include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, James Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison.