(TENTATIVE COURSE MODEL.  CONTENT MAY CHANGE.)

English 377

Course Time:

Dr. Jennifer Shaddock

English Dept.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Twentieth-century British literature is, generally speaking, a period of literary experimentation and human lamentation.  It is also considered "the age of irony."   The course will present a survey of the period, covering novels, essays, poetry and plays with thematic issues that include gender, sexuality, imperialism and war and their relationships to one another.

This semester I am exploring a new way of approaching the course in light of September 11, 2001.  Critical theorist Edward Said has been influential in my attempt to restructure this course.  Said argues for a concept that he calls "worldliness" in literature, in which literature teachers restore works to "their place in the global setting, a restoration that can only be accomplished by an appreciation not of some tiny, defensively constituted corner of the world, but of the large, many-windowed house of human culture as a whole."  Because the British Empire spanned three-quarters of the globe in the late nineteenth century, the literature of twentieth-century Britain is necessarily global in its response to the consequences of this imperialist intervention.  Whenever possible, I try this semester to include texts that will inform us of broader perspectives than the traditionally Euro-centric perspectives generally offered within certainly the Modernist canon.