ENGL 6545 - [Key Texts of Modernity]

Not offered 2017-2018. 4 credits. Student option grading.

L. Brown.

This course will develop critical perspectives on modernity through four juxtapositions of eighteenth-century and modern texts: Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) and Foe (Coetzee), the Spectator Papers (Addison) and Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Clarissa (Richardson) and “Penelope” from Ulysses (Joyce), and Tristram Shandy (Sterne) and Midnight’s Children (Rushdie). Key topics will include travel and empire, alterity and cultural encounter, commodification and post-Marxist “thing theory,” the public sphere and ideas of community, gendered identity and narrative interiority, and temporality and sensibility. Through these themes, we will consider the imaginative constitution of modernity in the eighteenth century, and its transformation or re-constitution in the twentieth.