Historical survey of literature in English: the mid-19th through the mid-20th century.

This course will examine different examples of British, Irish, American, and global Anglophone literature from the middle of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th. Moving across a number of genres and movements, we will focus on the ways novelists, poets, and dramatists have used literary form to represent, question, and produce different aspects of modernity (broadly construed). Particular attention will be paid to concepts such as realism, naturalism, expressionism, and modernism, and to literature’s broader engagements with ideas of race and immigration, gender and sexuality, colonialism and empire, diaspora, literacy, mythology, economics and labor, and technological advancement. Readings will include fiction by Charles Dickens, Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, James Joyce, Amos Tutuola, and Virginia Woolf; drama by Samuel Beckett, Adrienne Kennedy, Sophie Treadwell, and Luis Valdez; and poetry or essays by Matthew Arnold, WH Auden, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Rodolfo Gonzalez, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Virginia Woolf. Evaluation will be based on a combination of papers, examinations, and course participation.

Dickens, Charles: Hard Times; Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury; Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Tutuola, Amos: The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway.

Additional course readings will be made available.

Credit Restrictions

Offered for 4 units in fall and in spring, 3 units in summer.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills