Time Schedule:
Leroy F Searle
C LIT 362
Seattle Campus
Explores topics in literature and cultures of the modern world (approximately 1800-present) across national and regional cultures, such as particular movements, authors, genres, themes, or problems.
Class description
Comparative Literature 362: Topics in Modern Literature / English 313: Modern Literature in Translations
Professor Leroy Searle T Th 10:30-12:20 Denny 206
This course will focus primarily on Modern literature of the North Atlantic countries—England, America, France, and Germany—from about the turn of the 20th century to recent work. We will concentrate primarily on novels, with some poetry. This will be a course devoted mainly to reading, treating literature as a primary form of reasoning about people, culture, and political forces. The selected texts, listed below, are not only great reading, they are important documents in learning how to deal with a world rapidly expanding and transforming itself.
There will be a number of short written exercises (one page, single spaced), a short in class midterm, and a final paper, 5-10 pages, on assigned topics.
Please check the ISBN designation for the texts: you must use the assigned text.
Texts:
Henry James. The Ambassadors. Norton Critical Edition, ISBN-13: 978-0393963144 Joseph Conrad: The Heart of Darkness Modern Library, ISBN-13: 978-0375753770 Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse Harvest Books, ASIN: B009CRPDSQ Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis and Other Stories Oxford U Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199238552 Albert Camus: The Stranger Vintage Books/ Mass Market, ASIN: B00333IA1M Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum Houghton Mifflin, ASIN: B005DI8T3Y Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0060932145 Poems by Stephen Mallarme, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Lecture with Discussion sections
Recommended preparation
An interest in literature: no particular background is assumed.
Class assignments and grading
Short written assignments and in-class examinations
