Fall 2007 Courses

English 340-01: 20th-Century British and Irish Modernisms: Alienation and Apocalypse (Jarrin)

T/TH 10:10-11:40am, OLRI 350

From fin-de-siècle drama through postmodern apocalyptic fictions, in this course we'll explore the origins, transformations, and legacies of British and Irish modernism. Beginning with the notorious prose experiments of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf, we'll tune our ears to characteristic modernist literary forms and techniques (impressionism, stream of consciousness, free verse, metanarrative, intertextuality) and read modernism as an aesthetic of innovation and alienation with transatlantic and transnational sources. We'll ask: What distinguishes modernist texts from nineteenth-century romanticism, naturalism, and realism? Why are many of the famed practitioners of so-called "British" modernism American expatriates (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein), Irish authors and exiles (W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen) and immigrants (Joseph Conrad)? How do these texts respond to or reflect the historical forces of the World Wars, colonial occupations and independence movements, and British imperial decline? In particular, what were the cultural politics of the Irish Literary Revival and the literary response to Ireland's War of Independence, Civil War, and continued sectarian conflict? In the second half of the semester, we'll encounter post-WWII literary and cultural movements: Angry Young Man drama and British New Wave film, narratives of the post-1968 Irish "Troubles," postcolonial fiction, and the postmodern brutalities of "In-Yer-Face" theatre. We'll explore how these texts document generational shifts in working-class culture, respond to transformations and/or crises in masculinity, pose feminist interventions, represent diasporic immigrant and refugee communities, manipulate readerly desire, and ultimately challenge our expectations for how a novel/poem/play can look and sound.

Potential Texts: Poetry by W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Hugh MacDiarmid, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Stevie Smith, W.B. Yeats. Drama by Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill, Brian Friel, Sarah Kane, John Osborne, Mark Ravenhill, J.M. Synge. Prose by Martin Amis, Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Patrick McCabe, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, Alan Sillitoe, Meera Syal, Virginia Woolf. Films by Peter Greenway, Mike Leigh, Tony Richardson, Ken Russell.

Fall 2007 Course Listings