[Draft Syllabus- Changes to Readings Etc. Possible Until First Class Meeting]

English 12: Modern Literature

T, Th 10:30am to 11:50am, Bldg 540 Rm. 108, plus discussion sections

Professor Mark McGurl

Office hours: T, Th 12-1pm and by appointment

Requirements: 2 short (2-3pp) papers (30%); final (6-7pp) essay (30%); final exam (25%); section participation (15%)

Teaching Assistants: TBA

Schedule of Lectures

Week 1

April 4: Introduction: (Anti-)Modern Literature

Ballard, “The Drowned Giant” (1963)

April 6: Facts and Fancies, Characters and Caricatures

Poe, “A Man of the Crowd” (1840)

Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

Week 2

April 11: Victorians and Revolutionaries

Dickens cont.

Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto(1848) excerpt

[Bierce, “Moxon’s Master” (1899)]

April 13: Minimal and Maximal America

Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855)

Dickinson, selected poems (1861-63)

[Bierce, “A Horseman in the Sky” (1889)]

Week 3:

April 18: Ghostly Matters

James, The Turn of the Screw(1898)

Chesnutt, “Po’ Sandy” (1888)

Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)

April 20: Perversities of Empire

Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854)

Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

Kipling, “White Man’s Burden” (1899)

Hardy, “Drummer Hodge” (1899)

Week 4

April 25: The Modern Fall

Tennyson, “Vastness” (1895)

Eliot,“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915); “Preludes” (1917); The Waste Land (1922)

April 27: The Rise of the Masses

Eliot cont.

Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” (1919)

[Hammett, “The Kiss-Off” (1931)]

Week 5

May 2: Eye and Mind

Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall” (1917); “Solid Objects” (1920); “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923)

Stein, “Portrait of Prince B.D.” (1922)

May 4: Style and Time

Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River” (1923)

Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (1930)

Week 6

May 9: Narrating Trauma

Ashbery, “Some Trees” (1956)

Ferlinghetti, “[In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see]” (1958)

Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Atwood, “Happy Endings” (1983)

May 11: The Alien Point of View

Vonnegut cont.
Larkin, “High Windows” (1974)

Graham, “The Hiding Place” (1989)

Week 7

May 16: Domesticity on the Edge

Olsen, “Tell Me a Riddle” (1956-60)

Robinson, Housekeeping (1980)

May 18: Weird Realism

Robinson cont.

Perelman, “Primer” (1981)

Week 8

May 23: Haunted Families

Plath, “Daddy” (1965)
Carver, “Popular Mechanics” (1981)

Wallace, “Incarnations of Burned Children” (2004)

Morrison, Beloved (1986)

May 25: The World and the School

Morrison cont.

Desai, “Studies in the Park” (1978)

Mukherjee, “Courtly Vision” (1985)

Week 9

May 30: Media, Capitalism, Cruelty

Barthelme, “The Rise of Capitalism” (1973)

McCarthy, Remainder (2005)

June 1: Seeing the Limits of “Experience”

McCarthy cont.

Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas” (1979)

Howey, Wool, Part 1, “Holston” (2011)

Week 10

June 6: Conclusions and Prospects

Texts to be purchased. All other readings will be made available on Canvas as PDFs.

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin)

ISBN-13:978-0141439679

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage (Modern Library)

ISBN-13:978-0375757402

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford Classics)

ISBN-13:978-0199536016

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings (Modern Library)

ISBN-13:978-0375759345

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (Dial Press)

ISBN-13:978-0385333849

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Picador)

ISBN-13:978-0312424091

Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage)

ISBN-13:978-1400033416

Tom McCarthy, Remainder (Vintage)

ISBN-13:978-0307278357

Policies and Expectations

  • Regular attendance at lecture and participation in section is required.
  • Computers must be closed and stored, with rare exceptions allowed for compelling needs. Phones must be turned off during class.
  • The Honor Code applies to all written assignments and the final; the work you turn in must be your own.
  • If you require any particular accommodation or assistance in taking this class, please speak to the professors or course coordinator at the earliest possible point. If you have a letter from the Office of Accessible Education, please provide this at the beginning of the course.

Absences and Late Assignments

Attendance in this class is extremely important: much of the course content is covered solely in lecture, and each section covers a considerable amount of material. Attendance is kept by an attendance sheet—please be sure each day to initial this. If you have to miss class, please let your TA and course coordinator know as far as possible in advance, and be sure to speak with your TA after the absence.

One or two absences from lecture will not affect your grade; thereafter, each absence from lecture draws down the total grade by 0.3 GPA. For section, each absence draws down the total grade by 0.3 GPA. It is possible to make-up one section absence by arrangement with your TA. Also, it is possible once per quarter to attend a section other than your own. Please notify your TA at least two days in advance if this will be necessary.

Assignments are due by email to your TA by 5:00 pm, as described above. Late assignments are penalized at the rate of 0.3 GPA per day. Exemptions from this penalty are granted in cases of compelling need at the discretion of the TA.

Learning Goals

Through this course, you should gain:

  • knowledge and understanding of how texts fit together into a broader literary history and how that literary history relates to concurrent political, social, and religious events
  • awareness of the major literary movements, terms, and forms of the period from 1850 to the present, along with an appreciation for their relevance and connection to later literary developments
  • reading skills: In this course you will continue to refine your ability to read and interpret both poetry and prose narratives, sometimes in isolation and sometimes in the context of literary history or the cultural conditions in which they were produced or received. Reading well means not only that you can understand a text but that you can read it aloud clearly and with appropriate expression, conveying its sense to a listener.
  • writing skills: writing assignments are designed to develop your abilities (1) as readers and (2) as practitioners in the discipline of literary studies, which requires you to clearly articulate a line of thinking with specific references to text.