Texts:

A Preface

Like any century-long survey, this course is a hard one to teach because it offers so many choices in literary paths.  Indeed, some of the difficulties of this course come not from the literature itself, but rather from the historical and cultural vagaries which making talking about "twentieth-century English literature" a proposition fraught with difficulty.  When does the “century” begin?  It would be easy to say “1900” (or, for purists, 1901), but what do you do when one of the most important figures in twentieth-century literature, William Butler Yeats, starts his career firmly in the nineteenth century?  Or when one of the earliest “modern” poets, Thomas Hardy, really only came to poetry after a successful career as a late-Victorian novelist?  And what of that “English”?  Does that take into account American publications, which are certainly in English but which are arguably a different animal than what grew up in England itself?  The American shibboleth is easy to dismiss, since we’ve been separate from England for over 200 years.  But what of Anglo-Irish literature, or Anglo-Indian literature, since both of the hyphenated nations there only became nations in the twentieth century?  How do we account for such a vast dispersion of times and texts?

Or genres, for that matter?  As I’m looking at this course, I see distinct patterns of development where one genre dominates the cultural scene.  For instance, modernists were both poets – Yeats, Eliot, Pound, MacDiarmid – and fiction writers -- Joyce, Woolf, Ford, Barnes.  But after their great strides, the novel receded while poetry stayed strong, through Auden and the Thirties Poets, then into the Movement Poets mid-century.  But then, unlike America’s, England’s economy failed to undergo a post-WWII boom and so we can see the rise of working-class fiction and drama, particularly the latter.  However, by the Sixties, poetry and drama have both receded in the face of increasingly important novelists, from Great Britain and the post-colonial English holdings alike.  At no time were any of the three genres completely dormant, but they ebbed and flowed during the century.  (And, in my estimation, all took a back seat to British youth culture – the mods and rockers of Quadrophenia, the punks of 1976 London – in the Sixties and Seventies and beyond.)   How do we deal with this tidal rise and recess, then? 

The Options

There are several ways which this might be handled.  I know that my predecessor here often chose two representative figures, Yeats and Eliot, and taught them exclusively, or taught them as centerpieces, with ancillary figures moving in and about them.  This appeals in one way because we can explore in great detail the works and themes of two seminal figures.  Yet part of what excites me about the twentieth century is its very diversity and this approach misses that almost entirely.

We could also follow a number of “arcs,” charting poetry from Hardy to Fenton first (with a subunit on Irish poetry from Yeats to Muldoon), charting fiction from Joyce to Rushdie, charting drama from Beckett to Stoppard.  I like this immensely because it would allow us to concentrate our studies on one “thing,” or genre, at a time and see how it shifts over time.

But that nasty notion of time – history, culture, change – bothers me continually.  I dislike the notion of skimming the century once for poetry, once for drama, once for fiction.  We miss in this conception the links between how, say, Osborne and Larkin both react to the post-war malaise.  That’s important, I think, and so I’ve opted for a slightly more aesthetically-based way of moving through the class.

One of the thing that makes the twentieth century interesting is that the writers more or less consciously grouped themselves into movements.  We begin with the Modernists, less a coherent body of friends writing than a disparate mess of folks with some similar literary ends in mind.  Then there are the Thirties Poets.  Then the New Apocalypse writers, then the Movement writers.  In drama there were the Absurdists followed by the Angry Young Men.  Fiction went through several periods as well; for us in this course we’ll move from Modernist pretty much to post-colonial works.  Finally, I want to touch on the “Irish question” as a separate movement, since it presents its own problems (and because it’s generated two Nobel Prize winners during this century).  Throughout this series of movements, we’re going to be reading the writers who belonged to and wrote around the fringes of, or against, these movements.  I hope that we can explore the major roads literature took during the century while also pausing on the interesting paths which grew up around those roads.

Course Requirements:

The Requirements here are pretty simple:

Plagiarism

This is really simple:  if you copy someone else's direct words or exact ideas -- intentionally or not -- without giving them credit you fail the class.  Universities and colleges are built upon the notion that ideas matter; if you plagiarize someone else's ideas, you're denying that fundamental tenet.  Thus there will be zero tolerance for plagiarism in here.  If you do it, you will fail the course, period. (Please see also "Academic Dishonesty" in the college's catalog as well as the relevant sections in Hacker's Bedford Handbook.)

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