ENGL 6530 - [The Modern Imagination: The Major Authors]

Spring. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with ENGL 4535.

D. Schwarz.

Following my credo, “Always the text; always historicize,” The Modern Imagination: Major Authors has been a successful course for relatively advanced undergraduates as well as for Ph.D students and MFAs. It is an indispensable, probing, and pleasurable course for those studying nineteenth, twentieth, and contemporary century Anglophone and European literature. Our readings will include works by Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Ferrante, Kundera,and W. G. Sebald as well as the poetry of T.S.Eliot, Yeats, and Steven/s. The emphasis will be on close reading of individual texts, but we shall place the authors and works within the context of literary, political, cultural, and intellectual history. We shall also be aware of critical and theoretical approaches. The course will seek to define the development of literary modernism and as well as Post-Modernism. We shall be especially interested in the relationship between modern literature and modern painting and sculpture. Within the very broad course rubric, students will be able to select the special topics on which they write essays and perhaps formulate subjects for further study.