Modern Literature

Modern Literature introduces students to literature written from approximately 1900 to 1945. Beginning with the study of representative short fiction of the period and then moving to poetry, particularly poetry that changes or rejects received ideas about poetic form and substance, the course addresses the ways in which modernism challenged and upset convention and tradition. The poetry of Eliot and Auden heads the high modernist and the between-the-wars period, and study of Hemingway?s reinforces the focus on modernism?s discontents, its rejections, its innovations. Satire, irony, and absurdity are examined through reading selected works of Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett. Throughout this course, students will read, discuss, and write about modernist literature and the aesthetic responses to political, social, and historical conditions in the first half of the twentieth century.

"This course is only for students in the General Arts & Science University Transfer program. "