Literatures in English III: 1900 to the present
Class Information
Instructor: Jerng, Mark
Time: TR 10:30-11:50
Location: 1150 Hart
GE Areas: Writing Experience
Description
Course 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.
Course Objectives
-Read across a range of twentieth century global Anglophone literature with attention to formal, stylistic, and historical concerns
-Develop skills in textual analysis with close attention to language, rhetoric, poetics, narrative strategies, uses of frames and perspectives, among others
-Develop skills in textual evidence-based argumentation
-Examine how literary writers have explored recurring historical concerns and political formations around xenophobia; racial, economic, and gendered inequality; the nation; the status of the human and the planet.
Student Learning Outcomes
-Students will be able to identify and interpret the significance of specific literary conventions within historical and social contexts.
-Students will show an understanding of writers' engagements with addressing complex social realities of colonial, environmental, racial, and gendered inequality especially as they shape ideas of personhood, social relations, labor, and freedom.
-Students will demonstrate and improve skills in textual analysis and textual evidence-based argumentation through feedback on and revision of writing assignments (Satisfies the Writing Experience GE Requirement)
-Students will demonstrate the use of secondary sources in order to put their ideas in the context of larger debates and intellectual concerns.
Grading
4 Discussion Responses 30%
Lecture Attendance 10%
Section Participation 15%
2 Literary Analysis Papers 30%
Final Research Paper in lieu of final exam
(revision of one of your Literary Analysis Papers) 15%
Texts
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
The Street, Ann Petry
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Anna Deavere Smith