Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines changes in society, culture and literature in the transition from the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, through a selection of works in a variety of genres and media from diverse geopolitical regions organized by various critical issues and approaches. The course may be repeated for credit if different topic is taught. Students with credit for ENGL 336 or ENGL 436 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Protest, turbulence, uncertainty. These three words characterize the always dramatic, and sometimes violent, clash between old and new that erupted in Britain and its global empire at the previous turn of the century, a turn most notable for its many twists. This is a time when British society became fractured and split to a degree rarely witnessed before. Conventional middle class values and assumptions were challenged in unprecedented ways by such developments as the new hedonism in art and literature, the emergence of the New Woman with her demands for sexual and social autonomy, struggles between intense imperialist and anti-imperialist sentiment, and rapid expansion of literacy and mass media along with new inventions in communications technology, such as the typewriter, telephone, phonograph and film. This course will examine a selection of novels, short stories and poetry that struggle to make sense of the accelerated transformations in British culture and society during this exciting historical moment. Through a variety of texts set in Canada, Africa, India, and the UK, we will explore the multi-textured and often contradictory responses to empire, technological innovation, class conflict and gender politics. We will especially concern ourselves with the way this body of literature attempts to mediate the private individual’s relation to a complex and rapidly changing world conceived as global in scale. And we will connect these thematic concerns to changes in literary form, constructions of authorship and the reading public.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: