This course is a survey of English and American literature from the twentieth century, with close attention given to literary form and technique as responses to the experience of “modernity.” Instead of approaching the modern/postmodern divide as an absolute, we will investigate the evolution of similar problems and techniques in literature that occur across the twentieth century. We will place particular emphasis on narrative style and literary representations of how time is experienced. To that end, we will begin by exploring the modernist preoccupation with the individual’s “inner life,” and trace how writers throughout the twentieth century attempt to represent subjective experience in very different ways. We will read five novels over the course of the quarter, and along the way we will survey a number of modernist poets (Eliot, Pound, H.D., Loy) before spending several days concentrating on perhaps the most famous of all modernist texts, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In our discussions, we will investigate the texts’ forms, patterns, techniques, ideas, cultural context, and intertextuality. For the final paper, you will be encouraged to develop your own line of questioning within an area of interest to you.

Course requirements include a demanding reading schedule, active in-class participation, response papers, a group presentation, and a final research paper of 6-8 pages.

• Photocopied course packet containing poetry and critical essays

Texts:

• • Joseph Conrad. The Secret Agent. [978019280169-2]
• • Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier. [039396634-8]
• • T.S. Eliot and Lawrence Rainey. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. [9780300119947]
• • Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts. [978-0156034739]
• • Graham Greene. The End of the Affair. [9780142437988]
• • Don DeLillo. White Noise: Text and Criticism. [9780140274981]