Literatures in English III: 1900 to Present
Class Information
Instructor: Solomon, Jeff
Time: TR 9:30-10:50
Location: 1130 Hart
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 designed to ready you for study in English. We will examine a series of works exemplifying the forms of aesthetic experimentation and formal innovations that emerge at the end of the 19th century. 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 upon social change and contribute to the discussion of social values as we track the key literary movements and elements of the century, from realism to naturalism to modernism to postmodernism, and then into contemporary forms that focus on questions of history, politics, place and displacement, exploring the limits of postmodernism and the emergence of posthumanism. 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%
Reading Responses: 35%
Quizzes: 10%
Close Reading Paper: 10%
Comparative Paper: 15%
Final Research Paper: 20%
Texts
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Endgame, Samuel Beckett
Dutchman, Leroi Jones
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot