British Literary Traditions (250-0-20)

Instructors

Helen Thompson

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L05: Mon, Wed, Fri 10:00AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

This course surveys major British literary works spanning the late eighteenth century through World War II and the postcolonial era. You will be introduced to the major literary developments of these two centuries over four units. We begin with Romanticism and its still revolutionary challenges to reigning systems of property, enslavement, patriarchy, and even reason itself (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Ottobah Cugoano, Mary Wollstonecraft). The class's second unit engages the afterlife of Romantic revolution and the rise of nineteenth-century prose realism: do realistic novels and short fiction affirm Britain's transition into an industrial world power or do they expose the inequities of urban life, alienated labor, commoditized leisure, and global empire? We'll also read nineteenth-century poetry in unit two (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde; Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold). The course's third unit, New Forms, explores cataclysmic twentieth-century events and misgivings around the nation's imperial mandate, which catalyze the rupture with realism that fuels the modernist literary movement. We'll ponder the political resonance of such modernist formal innovations as stream of consciousness (Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and WWI and modernist poets including W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden). Our fourth unit, Against English, confronts postcolonial reworkings of the Englishness of this literary tradition's past and future (Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, M. NourbeSe Philip).

Teaching Method

Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method

Attendance/ participation/ analytic writing.

Class Attributes

Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
SoC Humanities and Fine Arts Distro