English 10C-2 - Spring, 2012

Literatures in English III: 1900-Present

Class Information

Instructor: Lauro, Sarah
CRN: 72306
Time: TR 3:10-4:30
Location: 163 Olson

Description

This class is designed to prepare you for upper-division courses in the English major. We will study literature from 1900 to the present, covering broad intellectual, aesthetic, and philosophical movements in British, American, and Anglophone literatures. To this end, we will be using an anthology that will give students an overview of the most important theoretical approaches to literary criticism. This course aims to teach literature of the 20th and 21st centuries by teaching how literature has been approached and examined during this era. We will get the broad scope of the century by means of short, in-class, and supplemental readings by Gertrude Stein, TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver and others and we will focus primarily on four novels. Students will emerge from this class with a sense of the way literature in English develops over the twentieth century, the central issues that have been a concern-- within modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, and the various critical and theoretical approaches that have been applied to literature of the time period.
In addition to the required texts listed below, supplemental readings will be made available online.

Grading

Midterm 15 %
Two Short Papers 15% each (30%)
Final Exam 15%
Presentation 15%
Long paper 20%
Participation 5%

Texts

Twentieth Century Literary Theory, K. Newton, editor
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Foe, J.M Coetzee
A course reader, Various