Studies in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature (368-0-20)
Topic
Empire, War, Worldliness
Instructors
Christine Froula
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-343: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM
Overview of class
The twentieth century has been called "the lethal century," more violent than any previous era. Contested though that claim may be, industrial capitalism, rival imperialisms, and rapid technological development converged to fuel interlocking civil, international, colonial, racial, and global conflicts, pressed by escalating machine warfare beyond the limiting human. Landmark literary works of the period confront such conflicts in many forms and on many fronts, from the racialized economic and cultural violence of European empires in Ireland, Africa, and India to genocide and the two world wars to decolonization and its vicissitudes to contemporary contests and "clashes" between the values of a declining imperial "west" and those of various rising "non-wests"--all under the globalizing domination of technological modernity.
In the spirit of what Edward Said calls "worldly," or multicentric, critical practices, we'll read selected works by Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Rhys, and postimperial writers against these contexts—and we'll find that "difficult" modernist texts become stunningly legible in light of historical conditions that are still very much with us.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area
Enrollment Requirements
Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration -- Reserved for English students.