This course will provide a general overview of innovative writing in twentieth-century Britain as well as a close look at many of the most daring, extreme, and controversial works of our time. We will begin with the first years of the century, and examine the newly emergent school of aestheticism ("art for art's sake") and the cult of decadence. We will go on to study new directions in the novel--the modernism of Virginia Woolf, the expressionism of Jean Rhys, and one of the more experimental chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses. After reading several short texts by Beckett, we will go on to look at the explosion of radicalism in the sixties and seventies in absurdist drama and the the more audacious works of fiction. Finally, we will survey the contemporary scene, looking at postmodern and postcolonial authors.

In addition to providing a general historical survey of authors, texts, and movements that are frequently mentioned though rarely studied in depth, this course will examine a number of related issues of modern literary history such as the changing representations of gender and sexuality, the nature and origins of postmodernism, the quest for a distinctively female writing practice, the curious tradition of the anti-traditional, and the question of the general relation between ideological positions and narrative forms.

Students will be responsible for some 30-35 pages of written work that will include a short research assignment on a single writer (5 pp), a term paper (10-12 pp), a take home final (7-9 pp), several one page papers to generate discussion, and occasional parodies and avant-gardist exercises. In addition, each student will be responsible for one oral presentation on a significant movement and its backgrounds. There will be one group workshop on avant garde compositional techniques and probably another on dating and evaluating anonymous pieces.

Grading: Assignment= 15% Term Paper= 30%  Final= 30%  Other  (inluding in-class work)= 25%

Since this is a seminar, regular attendance and participation are essential. Any student missing more than 20% of the classes or attending but unprepared to discuss assigned readings should expect the semester grade to be lowered significantly.
 Syllabus:

Sept 3 Introduction

Sept 8 Algernon Swinburne, "Sapphics"
Oscar Wilde, poems and epigrams
Walter Pater, "Style"
Lionel Johnson, "Nihilism," "Decadent's Lyric"
Aubrey Beardsley, "Venus and her Tannhauser"

Sept 10 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer

15 Wyndham Lewis, "The Enemy of the Stars"

17 Dorothy Richardson, from Backwater [handout]
Katherine Mansfield, "Bliss," "Miss Brill"

22 James Joyce, "Calypso"
S. Gilbert on "Calypso"

24-9 Joyce, "Sirens"

Oct 1 T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

Oct 6 Edith Sitwell, poems
Virginia Woolf, "The Mark on the Wall" and first    four chapters of To the Lighthouse

Oct 8-22 To the Lighthouse, cont.

Oct 22-9  Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Anna Kavan, "At Night"

Oct 29-Nov 3  Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing     (selections); "Ping"

Nov 5  Harold Pinter, "Landscape"
Tom Stoppard, "Artist Descending a Staircase"

Nov 10 Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine

Nov 12-9  Angela Carter, Infernal Desire Machines of Dr     Hoffman

Nov 24- Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River
  Dec 3

Dec 8 Ian McEwan, "As Dead as They Come"
Martin Amis, from Time's Arrow
Jeanette Winterson, "The Poetics of Sex"

Dec 10 Salman Rushdie, "Yorick"
Alisdair Grey, "Fictional Exits"
Margret Atwood, "Happy Endings"