Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Surveys poetry and prose from the seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the literary exploration of issues of humanity. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Modernity’s Mirror:
Self, Society, and the Crisis of the Modern  

This course explores how the individual human “subject” becomes problematic in the period of literary Modernism, an era of turbulent historical, technological, cultural and revolutionary change around the first years of the 20th Century.  

Working from Shakespeare’s most famous exploration of self-consciousness, we turn to August Strindberg’s drama concerning the political & sexual fault lines of feminism (1888), Lao She’s parable about innocence in corrupt Chinese society (1937), social resistance to the feminine in Rhys’s account of a British West Indian woman in London (1934), and Anand’s portrait of the moral consciousness of an outcaste youth in pre-independence India (1935).    

We will also watch screen versions of several of these texts as a way of exploring how the image of the individual carries ethical weight in global culture.  

Note: as a “W” course: students have the opportunity to revise written work for a higher grade.  The skills learned throughout the term help students with their written work throughout SFU.  

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

LEARNING OUTCOMES:           

• Introductory understanding of World Literature as a field practice                                                 
• Continuing comprehension of terms and concepts of literary criticism                                                 
• Familiarity with core themes of Modernist studies                                                 
• Ability to cognize & compare literary texts as cultural representations  

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

TEXTS: [SFU BOOKSTORE]                          
Shakespeare                Hamlet                             Oxford 978-0199535811            
August Strindberg         Miss Julie & Other Plays      Oxford 978-0199538041            
Lao She                       Rickshaw Boy                    Harper 978-0061436925            
Jean Rhys                    Voyage in the Dark            Penguin Classics 978-0141183954            
Mulk Raj Anand            Untouchable                      Penguin Classic 978-0140183955