Literatures in English III: 1900-Present
Class Information
Instructor: Jerng, Mark
Time: TR 9:00-10:20
Location: 202 Wellman
Description
ENL 10C is the third course in the required Literatures in English sequence. This is a reading-and writing-intensive class, designed to prepare you for upper-division courses in the English major. We will study literature from 1900 to the present, covering the broad intellectual, aesthetic, and social and political formations in British, American, and Anglophone literatures. While focusing on the textual analysis of poetics and rhetoric in novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and drama, we will learn major concepts such as modernism, postmodernism, historical consciousness, hegemony, racial formation, imperialism and neoliberalism, among others. We will organize this material through three general frameworks: one cluster of texts engaging issues of modernity and the ?human?; a second cluster thematizing political geographies pivoting around the ?country and the city?; a third cluster registering the formations of historical and cultural consciousness. Assignments and discussion will work to develop our critical reading skills in textual analysis and interpretation with observations on form, structure, rhetoric, and prosody, as well as our critical writing skills in developing a logical structure, defining key terms and questions, and evidence- and textual-based argumentation.
Grading
3 Short Close-Reading Papers 25%
Final Research Paper (broken up into two
assignments) 30%
Midterm Exam 15%
Final Exam 15%
Section Participation 15%
Texts
O Pioneers, Willa Cather
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The Street, Ann Petry
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Anna Deavere Smith