British Literature 1900-1945
Class Information
Instructor: Dobbins, Gregory
CRN: 84073
Time: TR 3:10-4:30
Location: 103 Wellman
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 Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, H.D., Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, 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
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien
In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming
Trilogy, H.D.