Literatures In English 1900 To The Present

What makes modern poetry modern? In this course we will examine the remarkable development of American poetry in the course of the twentieth century (with perhaps a glimpse at the twenty-first), looking in particular at the technical, social, and political variety of writing. We will look at a number of...

The last decade has, it seems, been dominated by one kind of crisis and another—economic, social, cultural, and ecological. In these years we have seen neoliberalism fall into a crisis of legitimacy, the rise of social media, endless wars in the middle east, the destruction of democratic norms and rising...

Surveys the major literary trends in prose and poetry from 1900 to the present in the Anglo-American tradition of modern, postmodern, and contemporary literature. Provides students with a grounding in the major authors and motifs of 20th- and 21st-century in literature in conjunction with political and cultural changes across the...

This course will begin with some central figures behind and within English language 20th-century poetry and then split up into interest groups according to the students’ own enthusiasms and desires to explore. The central figures will include Whitman, Dickinson, Pater, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, William Carlos Williams, H. D., Wallace Stevens,...

This course considers how the legacy of slavery, including the Middle Passage, is rewritten in 20 th and 21 st century novels in English. We will consider not only how that history is remembered, but how its legacy lives on. We’ll begin with slave narratives to consider the narrative form...

T.S. Eliot wrote several of the most important poems of the twentieth century. He was also a major critic, a playwright, and a publisher. His work remains a troubling mix of brilliantly subversive “raids on the unconscious” and deeply conservative reactions against modernity. To read Eliot is to encounter other...

A hybrid form, graphic narrative combines the innovative visual/verbal framework of the cartoon and the longer storytelling form of fiction and nonfiction. A term first coined in the US in 1978, graphic narratives have become a mainstay popular genre. This course will examine its popular appeal and also how this...

Instructor: Elisabeth Sheffield “There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.” (Vladimir Nabokov) In this course, we will examine the emerging form of the science novel—that is, the serious literary novel that takes as its subject matter the complex relationships between scientific knowledge and the people who...

Instructor: Prof. Janice Ho This course focuses on one of the most central literary movements of the twentieth century: the emergence of modernism in Britain and Ireland, especially of “high modernism” during the period of 1910 to 1930. Novels written in this historically short, but aesthetically rich, period laid the...

Surveys major literary trends from 1900-1945 in the Anglo-American tradition, including the characteristics of literary modernism. Covers both prose and poetry, as well as the relationship between literature and history to the close of World War II. Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors). Additional Information:...