Time Schedule:
Ted S. Wayland
ENGL 315
Seattle Campus
Various modern authors, from Wordsworth to the present, in relation to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, who have helped create the context and the content of modern literature. Recommended: either ENGL 230 or one 300-level course in nineteenth- or twentieth-century literature.
Class description
A course in modernism's diverse struggles with matter in the early twentieth century. We will look at why materiality posed a problem for artists of this period and how this engagement with objects and embodiment shaped their work. The course will consist of novels, short stories, poems and critical reading. Poems will consist of imagist, futurist, and vorticist works. Fiction will include short stories by Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf; novels will include Paul Scheerbart, The Gray Cloth; Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis; Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier; selections from James Joyce’s Ulysses; and Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.
Texts
Paul Scheerbart. The Gray Cloth. MIT Press. [978-0262692960]
Franz Kafka. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Penguin Classics. [978-0143105244]
Rebecca West. The Return of the Soldier. Penguin. [978-0141180656]
Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. Harvest. [978-0156628709]
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Lecture and discussion.
Recommended preparation
Some knowledge of 20th-century literature is recommended.
Class assignments and grading
The majority of the assignments will be short essays and a longer term paper.
