English 137 - Winter, 2021

British Literature 1900-1945

Class Information

Instructor: Dobbins, Gregory
CRN: 44510
Time: MWF 11-11:50
Location: Remote Instruction
GE Areas: World Cultures Writing Experience

Description

This course will provide a survey of literature produced in the first half of the twentieth century and will focus on the aesthetics and politics of modernism. We will begin with works written during the apex of the British Empire at the turn of the century and complete the quarter with a consideration of the aftermath of WWII. Along the way we will consider the numerous and profound political, social, and cultural changes that occurred during this period as we seek to understand what impact such transformations of the world made upon British literary conventions. In doing so, we will be reading works by W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, George Lamming, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett.

Grading

Two 5-6 page essays, short writing assignments, and final exam.

Texts

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Trilogy, H.D.
In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien