English 213, Fall 2015, Modern and Postmodern Literature

What did modernism do to us? Has it stopped doing it? What is the “post-” in “postmodernism” doing there? This course introduces the student to both modern and postmodern prose, mostly American and British, but with a few moments hopefully not lost in translation. Moving back and forth between modern and postmodernist fiction, this class will pair a few indubitably modernist literary texts with their later-born literary twins—so for instance we'll begin with Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and read it against the English writer Will Self's Dorian: An Imitation (2002); and pair Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with Cunningham’s The Hours, the title of refers to (one of) Woolf’s “original” titles for what turned into Mrs. Dalloway. The class will pay attention to imitations, forgeries, fragments, and copies (What is the status of the original? Is there an original?); representations of inner experience; and attune the student to matters of literary form. Reading will range from Ford Madox Ford to Italo Calvino, with Lydia Davis and Borges somewhere in between. Other authors are likely to include Angela Carter, Thomas Pynchon, and Jenny Offill's recent Dpt. of Speculation.

This course doesn't presume prior knowledge about literary history, but it does require that the reader be alert, assiduous—it’s a reading-heavy class—and articulate. There will be papers and an exam.