Brian Richardson

Susquehanna 4133

301-405-3839

Thurs 3:30-4:45 and by appt
 
 

In this course we will explore in depth the most significant and influential works of British, Irish, and Postcolonial literature of the twentieth century. We will chart the general trajectories and intriguing deviations of literary history, paying particular attention to the origins and development of modernism and the rise of post-modernism. Throughout the semester, we will follow the development and transformation of innovative formal techniques, debates over gender and empire, representations of the body, portraits of the artist and artistic self-fashioning, and the self-reflexive construction of an insistently intertextual literary history.
 
 
 

Assignments: 3 papers, 18-20 pp total.
 
 

Aug 29                   Introduction
 
 
 

Sept 5                    James, "The Figure in the Carpet" @

                                Conrad, "An Outpost of Progress" and "Amy Foster"@

                                Preface to Narcissus DW 216-18

                                Conrad, Nostromo pp 1-153 (to Part II, Ch 6)
 
 
 

Sept 12                   Conrad, Nostromo to end
 
 
 

Sept 19                   Yeats, DW 2305-31

                                 Synge, "Playboy of the Western Word" in Synge, Complete Poems and Plays

                                 Joyce, "The Dead," DW 2352-78
 
 
 

Sept 26                   Katherine Mansfield, "Daughters of the Late Colonel" DW 2266-79

                                 Mansfield, "Bliss" and "Six Years After" @

                                 DH Lawrence, opening of Women in Love @

                                 Lawrence, "The Daughters of the Vicar" @

                                 Lawrence, "Surgery for the Novel" DW 2614-17

                                 T.S. Eliot, Tradition and Individual Talent" 2447-52
 
 
 

Oct 3                       Ford, The Good Soldier

                                 Eliot, poetry, DW 2420-47
 
 
 

Oct 10                     Joyce, "Aeolus," DW 2380-2404
 
 
 

Oct 17-24               Woolf, To the Lighthouse

                                 Woolf, "Modern Fiction" @
 
 
 

Oct 31                    Jean Rhys, Quartet

                                Elizabeth Bowen, "Kor" DW 2690-99

                                Auden, poems, DW 2658-68

                                Edith Sitwell, poems @
 
 
 

Nov 7                      Beckett, Molloy and first 15 pages of Malone Dies in Three Novels

                                 Beckett, Waiting for Godot
 
 
 

Nov 14                    Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat
 
 
 

Nov 28                    Eva Figes, Waking @

                                 Nadine Gordimer, "Dreaming" DW 2873-79

                                 Margaret Drabble, "War" DW 2823-30

                                 Doris Lessing," to Room Ninteen "
 

Dec 5                      Short fiction by Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood,

                                 Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray @ Walcott, poetry 2888-96