This course will focus primarily on Modern literature of the North Atlantic countries—England, America, France, and Germany—from about the turn of the 20th century to the 1940s. We will concentrate primarily on novels, with some poetry. This will be a course devoted mainly to reading, treating literature as a primary form of reasoning about people, culture, and political forces. The selected texts, listed below, are not only great reading, they are important documents in learning how to deal with a world rapidly expanding and transforming itself.

There will be a number of short written exercises (one page, single spaced), a short in class midterm, and a final paper, 5-10 pages, on assigned topics.

Please check the ISBN designation for the texts: you must use the assigned text.

Texts:

Henry James. The Ambassadors. Norton Critical Edition, ISBN-13: 978-0393963144
Joseph Conrad: The Heart of Darkness Modern Library, ISBN-13: 978-0375753770
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse Harvest Books, ASIN: B009CRPDSQ
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis and Other Stories Oxford U Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199238552
Albert Camus: The Stranger Vintage Books/ Mass Market, ASIN: B00333IA1M
Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum Houghton Mifflin, ASIN: B005DI8T3Y
Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0060932145
Poems by Stephen Mallarme, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke