ENGLISH 356

The Modern Novel


Please note: this is archived course information from 2017 for ENGLISH 356.

Description

What is modernity and what makes a novel modern? This course will pose and provide answers to this question through the study of novels from a variety of cultures and decades from the early Twentieth to the early Twenty-first Centuries. Including in our focus works from Europe, Asia and America, we will consider not only the stories novels tell about modernity but also the formal innovations - of structure, style and voice - novelists have made in their attempts to respond to a world undergoing rapid social, technological and political change. Important foci and themes include the immigrant experience, loneliness and intimacy and America as icon and agent of modernity.

This class is based around a programme of lectures and weekly close-reading and writing assignments that will enable you to choose and define your own research area within a given text. Skills gained include:

  • Learning to place literary texts in the social and historical contexts that produce them
  • Developing an understanding of literary form: the ways literary texts engage, and sometimes change, history through imaginative labour
  • Learning to measure and manage your progress as an attentive reader of literature through weekly discussion with fellow class members
  • Learning to measure and manage your ability to write well about literature, its formal intentions and sociopolitical ends

View the course syllabus

Availability 2017

Semester 1

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Dr Eluned Summers-Bremner

Reading/Texts

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 

Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth

Franz Kafka, The Trial

WG Sebald, The Emigrants

Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Points

ENGLISH 356: 15 points

Prerequisites

30 points at Stage II in English

Restrictions

ENGLISH 220