Literatures in English III: 1900 to Present
Class Information
Instructor: Ronda, Margaret
Time: TR 9:00-10:20
Location: 146 Olson
GE Areas: Writing Experience
Description
10-C is the third course in the required Literatures in English sequence. It is a reading-and-writing-intensive course; it is designed to ready you for study in upper-division courses in English. We will examine a series of works exemplifying the forms of aesthetic experimentation and formal innovations that emerge after 1900 in Anglophone literatures. These texts offer insight into some of the key social struggles, changing forms of historical consciousness, and political transformations of this turbulent century. We will discuss how texts reflect on broader social change as we track the key literary movements and elements of the century, from modernism to postmodernism and into contemporary forms of literary production. Our course is organized by three central clusters: texts that highlight representations of subjectivity amidst changing historical conditions; texts that focus on questions of place and displacement; and works that explore postmodernism, posthumanism, and the dynamics of global capitalism. This course is intended to assist you in developing your skills as a close reader and critical interpreter of various literary genres. You will develop close reading and analytical writing skills, studying elements of form, genre, narrative structure, rhetorical argument, and style, and generating interpretive arguments grounded in textual evidence and secondary source material. This course fulfills the Writing Experience GE requirement.
Grading
Section Participation: 10%
Quizzes: 15%
Close Reading Paper: 15%
Comparative Paper: 20%
Research Paper: 25%
Take-Home Final Exam: 15%
Texts
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Endgame, Samuel Beckett
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
Potiki, Patricia Grace
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks