English 10C-2 - Spring, 2017

Literatures in English III: 1900-Present

Class Information

Instructor: Anderson, Katherine
CRN: 71360
Time: TR 1:40-3:00
Location: 235 Wellman

Description

The twentieth century was an age of challenges to established norms and authorities: the mass destruction resulting from two world wars, the global dismantling of European colonialism, and the fight for civil rights, among others. Amidst these public changes, individuals struggled to maintain their sense of identity, chronicling private and psychological changes in the literature of the period.

Similar shifting norms, and their effects on both individual and national identities, appear in our twenty-first century global world. How, then, can the self – and how can a nation – maintain a coherent and stable sense of identity? Throughout the quarter we’ll consider how each of our texts constructs the self, and in doing so, how they also construct “the other,” especially in relation to race and ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality. By the end of the quarter, you will have a better understanding of the specific literary movements and significant innovations that have emerged over the last century – including modernism, postcolonial literature, and the post-9/11 novel – and how they overlap, as well as a better understanding of the cultural issues, fears, and desires that appear in said literature.

Course Objectives:
As the culminating course in a three-part series, ENL 10C is designed to prepared students majoring in English for advanced work in upper-division literary studies. Accordingly, in this reading- and writing-intensive course, we will continue honing your ability to “read” and to “write”: to evaluate written information both critically and aesthetically, to recognize and scrutinize the aspects of writing that are, by definition or convention, “literary,” and to develop a critical vocabulary that enables you to articulate your ideas in more precise, complicated, informed, and interesting ways. Our sustained attention to the habit and craft of close reading will simultaneously attend to some of the major literary and historical movements and events of the past century. We’ll study Anglophone novels, short stories, poetry, prose, and drama from 1900 to the present, considering the complex and dynamic relationship among these national, regional, and transnational literatures and the place of modernism and postmodernism in this global literary geography.

Grading

Short Assignments: Reading Responses, In-Class Writing, Quizzes, etc. (20%)
2 Close Readings (20%)
Comparative Essay (20%)
Final Essay (25%)
Final Exam (15%)

Texts

The Family, Buchi Emecheta
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
1984, George Orwell
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf