The Modern Imagination: The Major Authors

Catalog description

This is an indispensable, probing, and pleasurable course focusing on major works of nineteenth, twentieth, and contemporary English and European literature. Readings will include works by Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Ferrante, Pamuk, Kundera, and W. G. Sebald. The emphasis will be on the joys of 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, but no prior experience in art is required.