8:55a-10:10a D (30) 3 cr.
A course on world literature 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
several key questions:
–what has it meant to live in the modern age, or to be confronted
with modernism in
literature and the arts in our century? And for a literature known
for its modernity, is
time portrayed uniquely? Do we worship the future or fear it? Do we
sanctify the moment of
“now”? Do we have a new relationship with the past (with
“tradition”)?
–and what does it mean for English to have become the worldwide
language for political,
economic, and (to some extent) cultural communications in the
Twentieth Century? What are
some main themes in postcolonial or international English literature,
and how has this
writing impacted on our more traditional sites for literary production
(for example, its
impact on American literature, or on the literature coming from
England and the British
Isles)?
Because the readings in this course are somewhat diffuse, I want you
to write a series of
short papers, 2-3 pages long, and ideally, write about almost all of
the readings in the
course. You will also take two exams that will test your factual
knowledge and close
reading abilities.
In this course we will deal with literary modernism, which we will
approach through poetry
first of all; we will study a range of poets including Pound, Eliot,
Williams, Stevens,
Moore, Lowell, and Plath, all of whom are profiled in the video series
“Voices and Visions,”
from which I will show selections in class. We will look at different
ways in which writers
have depicted the flow of thought, using Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway as an example
of stream of consciousness fiction. We will look at visions of the
future, particularly
dystopian projections of dehumanization and apocalypse as found in
Orwell’s novel
1984 and Beckett’s play Endgame. In the unit devoted to
world literature in
English, we will read two plays that deal with the connection between
postcolonialism and
gender and identity conflicts, Churchill’s Cloud Nine and
Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is
Dead, and survey a number of short pieces by writers from Africa,
India, and the
Caribbean, using the anthology A Concert of Voices.