ENGLISH 101
Literature and the Contemporary
Please note: this is archived course information from 2017 for ENGLISH 101.
Description
The five-paragraph essay. The 140-word tweet. Chapter books. Arguably, the structure of a narrative is as essential to making meaning with texts as are the words themselves. In English 101, we will traverse a wide range of literatures that make use of different forms and media, from Virginia Woolf’s post-World War I novel To the Lighthouse, to Christopher Nolan’s postmodernist masterpiece Memento, to the New Zealand hypertext novel The Brain of Katherine Mansfield. Along the way, we will explore how structure interacts with style, perspective, characterisation and setting to influence the themes of our prescribed texts, including war, memory, trauma, subjectivity, ecological crisis, changing gender roles, imperialism and postcolonialism.
In this course, students will:
- learn to read and interpret different kinds of fiction;
- practice developing written and oral arguments about literature;
- and familiarise themselves with some of the major cultural movements of the Twentieth Century.
Availability 2017
Semester 2
Lecturer(s)
Lecturer(s) Professor Erin Carlston
Reading/Texts
Prescribed texts are likely to include works by Arnold Bennett, Don DeLillo, James Joyce, Bill Manhire, Christopher Nolan and Virginia Woolf.
Points
ENGLISH 101: 15 points
