 |
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Fall 2008
ENGL 175 Global Literatures in English (description is for all 4 sections): TIMES TBA This course offers an introduction to global literary studies and to critical writing. Its goal is to introduce you to a range of influential literatures, to enhance your analytic skills of close reading and textual comparison, and to improve your expository writing ability. The subject of the course is twentieth-century English-language modernism and its successors, postmodernism and postcolonialism. The course attends to the effects of each tradition on its successors, and, reciprocally, the effect of subsequent traditions on our understanding of the implications and deficiencies of previous movements. Part I, "The Shock of the New," focuses on the first decades of the twentieth century, when a powerful desire for change swept over writers and artists in Europe (including Western Russia) and the United States. Under this influence, the art that was produced was self-consciously "modern," conceived in reaction to traditional subjects and conventional styles of representation. Art had to be made "new," modernists believed, in order to respond to a world changing, often violently, at the beginning of a new century. The approach to modernism must be comparative, as "new" meant different things in different cultures; through comparisons, you will learn to perceive competing and often contradictory or "alternative" formulations of the modernist movement. Part II, "The West and the Rest," addresses classic literary texts from Great Britain and the United States alongside what may be called postcolonial responses—literary texts by writers from other traditions that respond to Western "modernism." This juxtaposition foregrounds the nature of intertextuality in literary discourse: is intertextuality a manifestation of the "anxiety of influence"? Is it a contamination of the modernist tradition by its admirers in other cultures? Or is it a strategy of writing back from the colonies to the metropole, in order to "repair" the original? The geographical criss-cross between a classic modernist text and its rewriting will not only affirm the power of the original but also raise questions about the nature of literary value and indeed all culture in the era of Western expansion and colonialism. Part III, "Mapping the Postmodern," concludes the course by charting "postmodernism" as a cultural response to World War II, global decolonization, and the deindustrialization of the economic North. The texts illustrate significant fault lines or points of difference in critical debates about postmodern literature and its styles, strategies, and political effects. For some writers, postmodernity has been cause for lament and nostalgia; for others, it has enabled self-expression, the recovery of previously unspeakable histories, and new models of liberation. This final section will provide you with an introductory critical vocabulary and set of fictional experiences about one of the most influential and challenging cultural constructions in our contemporary world. |
|