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Topics in Modern British Novel

ENGL 265.301
instructor(s):
MWF 11

This advanced seminar will explore the problematic of history in some classic examples of British modernism. Reading novels from England as well as its former colonies, we will consider problems of historical representation, theories of historical knowledge and memory and the historical status of the subject. Central to this exploration will be an investigation of the reflexive relationship between the Ònovel,� a familiar yet endlessly fluid literary genre, and the Òmodern,� a term that is equally familiar, and yet notoriously difficult to define. Works to be studied may include novels by Sterne, Conrad, Wilde, Joyce, Forster, Woolf, Beckett, Greene, Swift, Ishiguro, Achebe, Gordimer, Rushdie, Coetzee; film adaptations will be screened when available. The course will run as a seminar, with primary emphasis placed on class discussion. In addition to significant amounts of reading and enthusiastic class participation, course requirements will include a mid-term essay, a final seminar paper and weekly reading responses.

fulfills requirements