English 10C-2 - Spring, 2015

Literatures in English III: 1900 to present

Class Information

Instructor: Afflerbach, Ian
CRN: 32392
Time: TR 1:40-3:00
Location: 1120 Hart

Description

As the culminating class in a three-part series for majors, English 10C is designed to help you continue developing the critical skills required for literary study by surveying the important movements, experiments, problems, and possibilities introduced in Anglophone literature over the last hundred years. Through a reading- and writing-intensive workload, as well as class discussion, our course will help prepare you for upper division classes by allowing you to practice forming arguments that combine attention to the unique construction and aesthetic experience of a text (“close reading”) with critical judgment of the historical and cultural values that texts can reproduce or challenge.

Since the turn of the twentieth century, the geographic, stylistic, socio-political, linguistic, and thematic range of writers in English has expanded at a staggering rate. To help us appreciate and frame this single overriding fact about studying literature since 1900, our course will be organized around a set of geopolitical concepts used to locate and describe the value of these emerging English literatures: nationalism, transatlantic exchange, empire and the struggle for decolonization, world literature, American “program” fiction, and popular genre fiction. Drawing on readings from Nigeria, England, the Caribbean, the United States, Ireland, and the spaces between, we will observe how the English language has acted as a market for hosting (and producing) an increasingly diverse series of exchange between self and other through the category we call “literature.”

Grading

Short Responses: 15%
Close Reading Paper (4-5 pgs): 20%
Research Paper (6-7 pgs): 30%
In-Class Participation and Writing: 15%
Final Exam: 20%

Texts

Endgame, Samuel Beckett (ISBN 9780802144393)
Death and the King's Horseman, Wole Soynika (ISBN 9780393977615)
A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid (ISBN 9780374527075)
The Stone Gods, Jeanette Winterson (ISBN 9780156035729)
Course Reader, (Davis Copy Shop)