The first part of the 20th century, shaped largely by World War I, marks a radical break with the past. Known as the Modernist period, these years saw a flowering of literary and artistic experimentation. Such writers as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf investigated new ways of representing consciousness and subjectivity through stylistic dislocation and fragmentation innovations echoed in painting, music, theater and film. World War II and its aftermath are sometimes called the Postmodern period. Writers such as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee explored the human condition in an age characterized by the rise of mass and visual culture, the threat of atomic destruction, the disintegration of colonial empires and increasingly pressing issues of ethnic and national identity. While focusing on close readings of the texts, this course will also study ways in which 20th-century literature has been informed by, and has established, globalism and nationalism. It will pay attention to literature as history, history as literature, and the role of literature in the community of expressive arts. This course satisfies the Core Curriculum requirement in the Arts. Prerequisite or co-requisites: English 102, CORE 101, NitZ 180, or CORE 301.
2016-2017 Course Catalog / Courses / Literature in History III: Twentieth-Century Voices