English 350:355 Twentieth Century Fiction I
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Fall 2012
Monday and Thursday, Period 3, Murray 213 (CAC 18078)
This course is a study of novels and stories drawn from the English-language literatures of the first half of the twentieth century. The goal of the course is to understand the many ways of being modern that the fiction of this period pursued, learning why “modernity” and “modernism” are powerful but problematic conceptual frames for approaching this epoch of literary history. Our readings will be clustered around five overlapping themes: the celebration of the aesthetic, race in global context, small- and large-scale violence, the social real, and cosmopolitan culture. Texts may include novels or stories by Henry James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Djuna Barnes. The format of the course will be mixed lecture and discussion. Assignments: regular informal writing, two papers, take-home final.
English 350:437 Topics in 20th Century Literature
Popular Reading: Low to Middling Genres, 1890–1945
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Fall 2012 (CAC 15773)
Monday and Thursday, Period 2, Scott 102
This course explores a key period in the history of pleasure reading and genre writing in English: the first half of the twentieth century. By 1900, more books were being published and more people were reading for entertainment than ever before, on both sides of the Atlantic. What did people read? This seminar looks at the beginnings of genres that rose to popularity around 1900 and continue to flourish today, even if they aren’t always classified as “literature”: mystery, romance, thriller, science fiction. We will also read some examples of popular poetry and of a more respectable novelistic genre that was nonetheless too popular for the most advanced taste: the realist novel. We will pay special attention to gender among readers and writers; developments in publishing; sincerity and self-consciousness; sex and violence; the question of realism and the fantastic; the fictions of social class; the impact of war; and the varieties of prose style. This reading-intensive seminar will culminate in a research paper.
Literary Foundations II
Eugene Lang College, The New School, Spring 2012
MW 12:00–1:40 p.m. (LLST2002D) and MW 2:00-3:40 p.m. (LLST2002E)
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The second half of a two-semester introductory sequence for students in Literature and Writing, this course introduces key texts of literary culture from the seventeenth century to the present, focusing on Britain but including important texts from the United States and Germany as well. Its chief aim is to develop the skills of analyzing and interpreting individual literary texts intensively. Such intensive analysis develops in tandem with the critical ability to find resonances and kinships among texts: hence the course provides a broad (and necessarily highly selective) overview of four centuries of literary history, emphasizing developments in genres, forms, themes, and cultural and social contexts. Study of writings by Donne, Milton, Swift, Goethe, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dickinson, Douglass, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, and Kafka. Seminar topics include modernity and its monsters, fictionality and authenticity, the novel among the genres, the changing meanings of “literature,” and the intersections of race, gender, and empire.
Writing Seminar. Coming of Age: Selves, Writers, Societies
Gallatin School, NYU, FIRST-UG383, Fall 2011, MW 12:30–1:45 p.m. 7 E. 12th St., Rm. LL 27
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This writing seminar explores the inescapably social process of growing up. How can people both become who they want to be and participate fully in society? What do personal development and socio-economic development have to do with one another? How do coming-of-age fictions from Jane Austen to Kazuo Ishiguro reflect on questions of identity, belonging, sexuality, growth, modernization, and citizenship? These questions will be the occasion for intensive work on students’ own intellectual development as writers and readers. Three shorter essay assignments—selecting and interpreting textual evidence, responding to a theory, and incorporating a personal motive—build up to the culminating literary-critical paper on the coming-of-age novel. Social-scientific accounts of the development of persons and societies will provide context and counterpoint to the literary works. Readings include works by Jane Austen, James Joyce, and Anne Carson; scholarly essays in sociology, psychology, and literary studies.
The Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Stanford University, English 156a, Winter Quarter 2011, MW 1:15-3:05, 160-329.
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Intensive study of one of the greatest and most challenging twentieth-century poets, Wallace Stevens, from his early, playful lyrics to his monumental meditative sequences of the 1940s and 1950s. We will spend time learning and luxuriating in Stevens’s language, but we will also pay critical attention to biographical and historical contexts. Topics include: modernism 1910-1955, abstraction, literary politics in the 1930s, poetry and war, the late-Romantic lyric, philosophical poetry, the sequence form, poetic sound, humor, “late style.” We conclude with a survey of Stevens’s influence on later poets. There is no formal prerequisite, but English 160 (Poetry and Poetics) is strongly recommended.
Everything But Modernism: Low to Middling Genres
Stanford University, English 154b, Autumn Quarter 2010, MW 3:15–5:05, 160-317.
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Since the era of modernism (1890-1940), we have learned to distinguish sharply between “high” literature, serious and advanced, and low or middlebrow literature. Exciting as the high culture of modernism is, what about all the other kinds of imaginative writing people read for pleasure? Reading American and British works 1900-1940, this seminar explores the ancestry of the ever-popular but still-stigmatized realm of “genre” writing. Genres include: mystery, romance, thriller, scifi, war poetry, and the realist novel. Knowledge of modernism not required.
Prizewinners: Anglophone Novelists and the Nobel Prize, 1991–2007
Stanford University, English 153d, Spring Quarter 2010, MW 3:15–5:05, 160-319.
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An experiment in examining the global phenomenon of the late-twentieth-century novel in English through the most naive possible lens: the Nobel Prize in Literature. We read works by the five English-language novelists to win the Nobel since the Cold War: Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Doris Lessing. Topics include: “world literature,” postcolonial writing and race, realism and novelistic form, the relation to American and British canons, and the sociology and politics of the Nobel. The main objective, however, will be to explore what kind of reading the prize itself invites by grouping these writers together.
Expats and Cosmopolitan Fiction, 1900–1940
Stanford University, English 154, Autumn Quarter 2009, MW 1:15–3:05, 60-118.
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If there is an international republic of letters, those writers who leave their home countries, becoming expatriates or exiles, are among the prime candidates for citizenship. But what is the relationship between writers’ cosmopolitan lifestyles and their writings? Do those writings participate in other kinds of internationalism—cultural or political? Or do they bespeak a longing for home? Do these texts give form to rootlessness or global vision, nostalgia or adventure? This seminar studies these questions in the fiction of the golden era of expatriates and exiles, 1900-1940, with a special emphasis on historical contexts from the founding of Cosmopolitan magazine to the Great Depression. Readings include novels or stories by writers from the United States (Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes), England (E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood), Ireland (James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen), and Jamaica (Claude McKay).