Department of English

This course offers a road map through some of the major literary developments of the chaotic century just behind us. We will see how writers and artists attempted to make a break with the Victorian past by highlighting irony, ambiguity, and fragmentation in their works. In addition, this course will examine the ways in which the modernists and their successors engaged social and political questions in and through their aesthetics. We will begin with Joyce's urban snapshots in _Dubliners_, and continue with the poetry of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Marinetti's Futurist and Tzara's Dadaist manifestoes, and texts by figures as various as T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison, and Philip K. Dick. We will also look at some representative artwork by Chagall, Duchamp, Mir�, and Dal�, listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and watch films by Charlie Chaplin, Ridley Scott, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Requirements: three medium-length essays, occasional quizzes, and a final.