Department of English

Fulfills General Requirement in Arts & Letters

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 their works. 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, Zora Neale Hurston, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Haruki Murakami. We will also look at some representative artwork by Chagall, Duchamp, Miro, and Dali, listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and watch films by Charlie Chaplin, Ridley Scott, and Krzysztof Kieslowski.