ENG 2036 English V: The Modern Age
This course is an introductory survey of British and postcolonial literature since 1900, covering some of the important novelists, poets, and dramatists of the past hundred-plus years, with an emphasis on the first half of the century. We will approach this period by way of several thematic units in order to explore a number of interrelated questions: the impact of World War One on the national psyche and on literary form; the unique emergence of Ireland as a hotbed of artistic and political rebellion; the relationship of new ideas of sexuality to modernist fiction; the mid-century response to modernist poetry; the dismantling of Britain as a colonial power and the resistance to standard English through local dialects; the use of experimental dramatic structures as a clue to the self-reflexive mindset of the 20th century. Throughout this course, we will seek to understand literature as a medium that articulates particular national, aesthetic, and sexual ideologies while often providing the resources from which these discourses can be challenged or reformed. Readings will be selected from among the following authors: Sassoon, Owen, Pound, Eliot, Ford, Yeats, Friel, Joyce, Auden, Larkin, Lawrence, Forster, Lessing, Woolf, Conrad, Orwell, McKay, Braithwaite, Gordimer, Rhys, Naipaul, Beckett, Stoppard, Rushdie, Hornby. *Note: ENG 1009 is a pre-requisite for admission into this course.
Prerequisite
ENG 1009