Literature, Culture, and Society: the 20th and 21st Century

Catalog description

Modern and postmodern literature by British, Irish, African, Indian, and Caribbean writers, who challenge the norms of power, culture, and gender as they found them. Key themes for the class: colonialism and primitivism, the formation of the Irish nation, new gender definitions and new sexualities, the city, technology and work, post-WWII youth cultures and new masculinities in England, British national identity at the time of the Cold War (James Bond as national icon), empire, decoloniality, and migration. Readings by Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Yeats, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Stevie Smith, Seamus Heaney, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi.