English 45C

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

Book List

Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart; Eliot, T.S.: The Waste Land; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway

Description

This course will survey Anglophone literature from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. We will evoke some of the key aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political trends that characterized the movements of modernity as we closely investigate a selection of the major texts from this period. At times the lectures will zoom in on particular features of texts, and at other times they will zoom out to consider cultural conditions, political contexts, philosophical matters, and aesthetic tendencies. We'll also consider modern literature in relation to modern music and visual art as well as developments in photography and film. In addition to the books listed above, there will be a small reader with texts by Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Du Bois, Yeats, Joyce, Stein, Eliot, McKay, Toomer, Stevens, Williams,Moore, Hughes, Auden, Bennett, Walcott, Beckett, and a few others. All texts will be available online. There will be two essays and a final exam.

Lectures will meet at the scheduled time and also be recorded and available for students to view on their own time. Attendance at scheduled discussion sections is expected, but students are welcome to contact the instructor to discuss any particular needs.

Discussion Sections

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