English 10C-2 - Winter, 2015

Literatures in English III: 1900-Present

Class Information

Instructor: Nguyen, Josef
CRN: 72512
Time: TR 10:30-11:50
Location: 293 Kerr

Description

English 10C is a reading- and writing- intensive course that serves as the final segment in the three-part historical survey series for English majors. We will focus on exploring literatures in English after 1900, as we hone critical reading and writing abilities through the application of terms, methods, and theories of literary study. We will read texts closely, paying attention to both the formal concerns around media, genre, and style as well as concerns over content and context to consider biographic and historic issues to place texts within aesthetic and literary traditions.

Through works in English from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, India, Singapore, and other spaces of the Anglophone world, we will construct a broad history of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century literature to consider how changes in spatial scales and scale-making bring people, animals, things, and ideas into contact and conflict with each other. We will interrogate how colonial histories, globalization, transportation infrastructures, migrations, diasporas, cosmopolitanism, and media circulations shift ideas and experiences of the local and the global, the country and the city, the nation and the world, and, ultimately, self and other.

Grading

Five 500-word Argumentative Responses: 25%
One 7-page Research Paper: 25%
Daily In-Class Reading Quizzes: 10%
In-Class Participation: 20%
Final Exam: 20%

Texts

The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh (978-0618711666)
The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst (978-0679722564)
Neuromancer, William Gibson (978-0441007462)
Death and the King's Horseman, Wole Soyinka (978-0393977615)
Passing, Nella Larsen (978-0142437278)
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (978-0156628709)
Papers, Please, Lucas Pope (videogame)
The Cat and the Coup, Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad (videogame)