L369 15880 STUDIES IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN AUTHORS
Susan Gubar

1:25p-2:15p MWF (30 students) 3 cr., A&H.

TOPIC: “Virginia Woolf and Her Contemporaries”

Through the works of Virginia Woolf, we will study the trans- nationalism of modernism, the experimental aesthetic movement associated with the first few decades of the twentieth century. Two of Woolf's major novels, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, will be supplemented by her two extended polemical essays, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Along with each of these, we will look at some of the poetry, fiction, and criticism of her contemporaries. These will probably include Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Ernest Hemingway, Katharine Mansfield, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Foster, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., George Orwell, and Katherine Burdekin. Taken together, all of these writers examine the great issues of the twentieth century: the ravages of world war and of imperialism, the causes and consequences of gender inequities, the multiplication of discourses about sexualities, the complex epistemological and ethical issues clustered around the social construction of subjectivity, the threats of racism and of fascism.

Students will be asked to produce two papers and to take two exams. Classes will be devoted partly to lecture, partly to discussion, so preparedness will be factored into the final grade.