English 45C

Book List

Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home; Coetzee, JM: Disgrace; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Luiselli, Valeria: The Story of My Teeth; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway

Other Readings and Media

Required course reader available from MetroPublishing (2440 Bancroft Ave).

Description

This course will survey British, American, and global Anglophone literature from the end of the 19^th century through the beginning of the 21^st. Moving across a number of genres and movements, this course will examine the ways 20^th- and 21^st-century writers have used literary form to represent, question, and even produce different aspects of modernity. Particular attention will be paid to close reading and key concepts in literary study, as well as literature’s broader engagements with questions of race, gender and sexuality, colonialism, mass media, and economy.  Evaluation will be based on three papers and a final examination.

Readings will likely include: fiction by James Weldon Johnson, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Salman Rushdie, Alison Bechdel, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, JM Coetzee, and Valeria Luiselli; drama by Samuel Beckett, Susan-Lori Parks, and Caryl Churchill; poetry by Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Matthew Arnold, William Butler Yeats, Rodolfo Gonzalez, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, TS Eliot, and WH Auden, among others.