9:30a-10:45a TR (30) 3 cr

OPEN TO MAJORS ONLY. DECLARED MINORS OBTAIN AUTHORIZATION FROM BH402.

A course on world literature of the twentieth-century written in English is a huge undertaking, and it requires us to think of some central rubrics around which to organize our explorations. I want us to keep two governing ideas in mind, one about the modernity of the century that has just passed, and the other about its international scope. In general, we will organize our work around two questions:
--what has it meant to live in the modern age, or at least, to be confronted with modernism in literature and the arts in our time?
--and what does it mean for English to have become the world-wide language for political, economic, and (to some extent) cultural communications in the twentieth-century?

Because the readings in this course are somewhat diffuse, I want you to write a series of two-page papers throughout the semester, about two per month, and you will also take two exams.

We will explore literary modernism first of all through poetry, and survey a number of great poets, several of whom are included in a video series I will draw on titled "Voices and Visions." (It includes Frost, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Lowell, and Plath, and there will also be some British and Irish writers found in the poetry anthology.) I will include three short novels, probably Virginia Woolf's seminal Mrs. Dalloway , 1984 by George Orwell for its political allegory, and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 for its theme of an alternate universe and its indeterminate form. We will read two plays that deal with the connection between postcolonialism and gender conflicts, Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill and M. Butterfly by David Hwang.

The bulk of our readings in the second half of this course will be drawn from an anthology of world literature in English, so be prepared to read a number of short pieces by writers from Africa, India, the Caribbean, and other parts of the English-speaking (or writing) world that range beyond our usual Anglo-American centers of literary production.