English 45C

Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century

Book List

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

Additional required course readings will be made available on bCourses.

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, JM Coetzee, and Valeria Luiselli; drama by Samuel Beckett, Susan-Lori Parks, Harold Pinter, and Caryl Churchill; poetry by Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Matthew Arnold, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, William Butler Yeats, Rodolfo Gonzalez, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, TS Eliot, WH Auden, Thom Gunn among others.

Discussion Sections

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