Studies in Contemporary Literature (461-0-20)
Topic
Global Modernisms
Instructors
Christine Froula
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
Our seminar will explore aspects of twentieth-century literary modernism, homing in on influential aesthetic, scholarly, and critical texts and their border-crossing receptions, including linguistic, transhistorical, and cultural translations into and out of English. We'll frame local and global case studies across the long twentieth century in accord with class members' scholarly and/or writerly programs, backgrounds, interests, and goals. In the spirit of Edward Said's "worldly," or multicentric, criticism, we'll "seed" our seminar by choosing twentieth-century primary texts to read together from possibilities such as: Kipling's Kim; Conrad's Heart of Darkness; Joyce's Dubliners and Ulysses (selections); Yeats's poetry; Forster's A Passage to India; Woolf's Mrs Dalloway or Between the Acts; Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius; Eliot's The Waste Land and/or "East Coker"; Beckett's Waiting for Godot; Narayan's The English Teacher; Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea; Salih's Season of Migration to the North; Rushdie 's Midnight's Children (film/ screenplay); Hirsi Ali's Infidel; Tricycle Theatre's The Great Game: Afghanistan; and other aesthetic, theoretical, and critical texts seminar members may suggest.
Evaluation Method
Attendance and participation; an informal weekly comment, question, analysis, or research question brought to class for discussion; a class presentation with handout and/or powerpoint; option of two or three shorter or one longer essay or project, such as a book review or review essay, a conference paper, a critical or scholarly project, a course description and syllabus, an anthology (draft introduction and annotated table of contents), a creative imitation or response, a translation or critique of translations, an analytic study of style, form, genre, influence, a creative imitation or adaptation; a self-evaluation.