Modern British Literature, 1890-1940 (Spring 2009 Proseminar)

Modern British Literature was an ENGL 6350 course offering by Richard Bozorth in the Spring of 2009

Course Description
This course will consider British Modernism from roughly 1890 to 1950 with a particular eye to gender and sexual politics, not only as subjects of literary writing but as cultural forces in the development of Modernism itself. We will be situating Modernist writing in relation to some long-recognized contexts: the Irish independence movement; the First World War and its aftermath; the rise of working-class political power; the “slump” of the 1930s; and the advent of fields like comparative religion, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. But we will also consider how radical changes in the politics of gender and sexuality inform major Modernist literary texts and Modernist literary theory, from Yeats and Wilde in the 1890s, through the fiction of Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Forster, the rise of Eliot as voice of conservative Modernism in the 1920s, and of Auden and his “group” as a late-Modernist left-leaning queer vanguard in the 1930s. Class discussions will grow substantially out of student presentations on the composition and publication histories of texts in question, and on the contemporary and later critical reception of these texts; these presentations will be accompanied by short papers. A substantial seminar paper will be required as well.

Required Texts

 * Auden, W. H., Selected Poems.
 * Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land.
 * Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier.
 * Forster, E. M., A Passage To India.
 * Lawrence, D. H., Women In Love.
 * Owen, Wilfred, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen.
 * Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse.
 * Yeats, W. B., Selected Poems and Four Plays.

Source

 * 1) Course Descriptions, Spring 2009. &lt;http://smu.edu/english/Graduate/schedsp2009.htm&gt;