9:05a-9:55a MWF (30) 3 cr.
Those of you who have seen or read Trainspotting know that
England has problems with
its borders. In one famous scene, the drug-addled Renton looks across
the ruined Scottish
landscape and shouts, "We're colonized by wankers!" This tension and
the type of fiction it
produces are nothing new. Since the early work of Daniel Defoe and
Jane Austen, British
fiction has been concerned with boundaries and their disintegration -
the boundaries between
nations and races, between the sexes, between classes, between the
individual and an
increasingly alien environment. The focus of this course is the
twentieth-century struggle
in British fiction between the rigidity of tradition and the drive for
cultural freedom. Be
prepared for debates and discussions in which our vision is not
limited to the traditional
drawing room, but extends across class and sexuality, throughout the
colonies, and beyond
the law. Of course, we will look at "true Brits," such as Woolf and
Fowles, who can help us
establish the changing national perspective, but we will also focus on
writers, such as
Joyce and Rushdie, who seriously question the terms "British,"
"nation," and “the novel."
Throughout, we will examine notions of tradition by way of those who
fall outside of it and
notions of difference by way of those who embrace alternative
traditions. We will pay close
attention to lesser known voices that have unconventional and
sometimes confrontational
relations to "British" literature. Throughout, our goal will be to
expand the borders of
this field, or at least prove them to be false, and to let the likes
of Renton have their
say.
The course will proceed historically and consider four different
periods. First, we will
explore the relationship between the collapse of Victorian culture and
the move away from
nineteenth-century realism in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.
We will then look at
the innovations of the modernists as they were influenced by social
revolution and the first
world war, focusing on Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man and Woolf's
To the Lighthouse. Next, we will consider the post-war years
and the "break-up" of
Britain, discussing the move toward the postmodern in John Fowles's
The French
Lieutenant's Woman and Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor
Hoffman. Finally, we will consider recent
post-colonial,post-imperial writings and the
ways in which they have renewed and expanded the definition of British
fiction. We will
most likely read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Jim
Crace's Arcadia
and watch films by Danny Boyle, Mike Leigh, and Neil Jordan.