This course will explore the question of what it meant to write the “modern” in British and American poetry and fiction from late Victorianism and the fin-de-siècle until just past the First World War. Through refining our skills in close and careful reading we will query especially shifting understandings and representations of culture, aesthetics, art, poetics, value, ethics, and meaning. We will be encountering literature by a range of writers such as Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot. We will also look briefly at contemporary modernist visual artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky.
Readings
- The Broadview Anthology of Poetry, 2nd Edition
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
- W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems
- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings
- The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Assessment
- Group presentation (20%)
- Attendance and active participation (20%)
- 5-6 minutes of leading discussion (5%)
- In-class test (30%)
- In-class essay, including drafts (25%)
**Subject to change**
Prerequisites
- ENGL 200
- ENGL 290
Additional information
This course is repeatable for credit under different topic titles.
