ENGL 256 - Modern British and Irish Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

British and Irish Literature from the first half of the 20th century. The mix and focus of genres, topics and authors varies depending on the instructor. However, the period in question covers such writers as Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Vera Brittain, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, and Graham Greene.

Topic for 2018/19a: Phenomenal Flesh. High modernist writers are particularly taken with the relation of perception and consciousness to lived experience. Their work shows close kinship with phenomenological philosophy, which explores the flesh as the medium of material existence. The course brings questions of the flesh as central attributes of particular groups certain groups to bear on these paradigms. We attend to the subtexts of gender, sexuality, desire, race, class, religion, nation, and ability. We read novels such as Conrad’s Lord Jim, Forster’s A Passage to India, Ford’s The Good Soldier, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy; poems by W. B. Yeats, Wilfrid Owen, and T. S. Eliot; and some theory. Jean Kane.

Prerequisite(s): AP credit or one unit of First-Year English.

Two 75-minute periods.