Draft Syllabus

1) This is a draft syllabus. I am still adjusting readings and assignments. Once I finish revising I will post the new syllabus and delete this post.

2) The blog will be closed when the class starts. If you are in the class, you will get an invitation to view and write on this blog. Course documents and grade sheets will be made available on Blackboard.

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EL 3087
Contemporary British & American Literature (II)
"The War"
Spring 2008
[Draft: Subject to Change]

Course Information:
Time & Place: A108, Monday 9-12
Instructor: Lili Hsieh (lili.hsieh@gmail.com)
Tel: (03)422-7151 ext. 33219
Office Hours: Monday, 1-4 pm
Course Websites:
• http://bb.ncu.edu.tw
(weekly response papers, grade sheet, course info, Reader, communication, etc.)
• http://el3087.blogspot.com
(extra credits)

Course Descriptions:

The coinage of the term "modernism" is, strictly speaking, a deferred action; the waves to "Make It New" rush to what Gertrude Stein calls the "Lost Generation" too soon and too late. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the term becomes part of ordinary language, the rebellious forces, so entrenched in the trenches, have passed their peak. Returning modernism to its historical stage, this class will introduce modern British and American writers and their infinitely complex relationships to the two World Wars. We will focus on close readings of major British and American writers, but discussions will extend to related aspects such as modern art, music, film, technology, and popular culture. This is a multi-media class; besides weekly readings, you will be expected to participate in film screenings outside of the regular class meeting times. The weekly reading load is 50-100 pages of primary literary works. See below for further descriptions of readings and other requirements.

Grading Policy:
Attendance & Participation 30%
Oral Presentation (Group) 20%
Midterm Exam 30%
Final Exam 20%

Requirements:
1. Attendance & Participation (30%):
I expect you to write me in advance for your absences. You are allowed three absences for the whole semester (excused or unexcused). You will need to meet with me to discuss make-ups if you miss more than three classes to avoid penalty. Being 20 minutes late to class or flagrant inattention in class will be marked as an absence.

2. Reading:
Completion of assigned readings is essential. This class is a seminar; you are strongly encouraged to take an active role in class discussions.

3. Weekly Group Response Paper:
In class, each group will hand in ONE response paper (1-2 pages in length), which you will also post on Blackboard. The response paper can be a list of your questions, passages your group finds interesting, or different interpretations by the group members.

4. Oral Presentation (Group Presentation) (20%):
Choose one of the five topics. I would like to meet with each group the week before your presentation. You can extend your oral presentation topic and write about it in relation to modern English literature for your final paper. The dates of the presentations are listed under “Class Calendar”.
1. Art/Painting
What happens to modern painting and how it affects modern literature, etc.
2. Travel:
Technology of travel; how does the foreign figure in modern literature, etc.
3. Music:
What is modernist music? What are other kinds of music during and between the wars (such as jazz)? What does modern/ist music have in common with modern/ist literature? Etc.
4. Women:
Gender and the Wars, Women Writers (on the Leftbank), Sexuality, Feminism
5. Culture:
Bauhaus, Hollywood, Education, high & low cultures


5. Mid-term Exam (30%)
Part I: Short Answer Questions 30%
You will be asked up to 30 questions with straightforward answers. Expect questions of identification.

Part II: Essays
1) Write a one-page short essay explaining an important passage drawn from the reading (the passage will be assigned to you during the exam). Explain in the essay what the author says and implies, and the significance of the passage in relation to the whole poem/novel/essay (30%)

2) Pick a text from our syllabus and ask a question or make an argument about it. In your essay, you answer your own question or construct your argument (for example, “Does Mrs. Dalloway commit suicide at the end of the novel?”). (40%)

6. Final Paper/exam (20%)
4-hour take-home exam. The exam is ONE essay question. You will be given multiple questions from which you choose to write on one. You have four hours to complete the paper.

Bonus Credits
 Write a reading journal.
 Comment or post on our blog (http://el3087.blogspot.com).
 Volunteer oral presentations on authors or key terms on syllabus.
 Organize or participate in “Marathon Reading Group.”
(Bring a text and read it together on Saturday afternoons; this works wonderfully especially for poetry and drama.)


Class Calendar:

Week 1 2/18 Introduction

Week 2 2/25 “To Write After Auschwitz Is Barbaric…”
Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” from The Common Reader
Marshall Berman, “Introduction: Modernity—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,”
in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, pp. 15-36.
• Film Clip: Chaplin, Modern Times
• Assign Presentation Topics

Week 3 3/3 “Make It New”
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” from Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
--, “The Symbolism of Poetry,” in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents, pp. 136-140
James Joyce, “The Dead,” from Dubliners
• symbolism & modernism
• The Irish Scene: Bloody Sunday and Joyce’s Ulysses
• “indirect discourse” and Stream of consciousness (1)
• Myth, Mythology, Allegory

Week 4 3/10 All That Is Solid Melts into Air
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J.L. Afred Prufrock,” from The Waste Land and
Other Poems, pp. 3-8
--, “The Waste Land” (especially “The Burial of the Dead” and “A Game
of Chess”), pp. 53-75
Audio Clips: T. S. Eliot reading
• Utopia & dystopia
• The “objective correlative”
• The Egoist
• Romanticism

Week 5 3/17 Llanguage & His-history
Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation” from Gertrude Stein: A Reader
Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” from Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, pp. 61-64
--, Cantos (I, XX, LIII), pp. 96-98; 121-122; 145-149
H.D., “Helen”

Slides: Picasso & Cubism
Presentation #1: Art (Painting)
• The Pound era—“Make It New”
• Imagism
• Cubism: War and Fragmentation
• Objectivity vs. Subjectivity
• William James & Stream of consciousness (2)

Week 6 3/24 From the Trenches
Ernst Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (Part I)
• “The Lost Generation”
• Masculinity & Castration
• Journalism & modernism
Presentation #2: Travel

Week 7 3/31 Class Cancelled; makeup class TBA

Week 8 4/7 Class Cancelled; make up class TBA

Make-up class (1): Film Screening—The Hours

Make-up class (2): Mid-term Review

Week 9 4/14
Finish The Sun Also Rises

Week 10 4/21 Trauma & Modern Literature (1)
Virginia Woolf, Ms. Dalloway (1)
• Shell shock & PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder)
• Sigmund Freud & Stream of Consciousness (3)
Presentation #3: Women

Week 11 4/28 Trauma & Modern Literature (2)
Finish Mrs. Dalloway
• Gender and Modernity
• Feminism

Week 12 5/5 Midterm Exam

Week 13 5/12 The Fault-Lines of Color

Yisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables” & “Yoneko's Earthquake" (in
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories)
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Part I & Part III; synopsis of Part II will be given
in class)

• Race & Gender
• Cultural Translation
• Double Consciousness


Week 14 5/19 Allegory of the Wars
Mathew Arnold, from Culture and Anarchy (“Introduction,” “Sweetness &
Light”), pp. 28-48
C. S. Lewis, from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Chapter 1)
Tolkien, “The Unexpected Party,” from Hobbit
** Highly recommended: See The Lord of the Ring and Narnia & bring your
ideas and questions to class for discussions
* Culture and the “English Question”
* Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism
* the Inkings
* High & Low
Presentation #4: Culture

Week 15 5/26 The Apocalyptic and the Messianic
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
• Minimalism
• The Holocaust
• Anti-Hero; The Man without Content
Presentation #5 Music

Week 16 6/2 The Tragic-comic Mode of the Wars
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (One, pp. 1-22; Five, pp. 87-135)
• Postmodernism
• parody
• Kitsch
• Meta-fiction

Week 17 6/9 “Security of Any Sort Is a Dirty Word”
Jack Kerouac, “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up…,” from
Portable Jack Kerouac, pp. 139-173
“Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” pp. 483-484

Audio clips: Bob Dylan & Allen Ginsberg
Screening: I am not There (if available)
Activity: Spontaneous writing
• Beat Generation
• the Cold War
• Rebel, refusal, resistance

Week 18 6/16 Final Exam

Required Readings

Reader (Available at Guaoguan)

Books Ordered:
Hemingway, Ernst. The Sun Also Rises (Required)

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five (Optional)

References (Arnold)

Ayers, David. Modernism: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd, 2004.
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Leftbank. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1986.
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity.
1982. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: A Guide to
European Literature, 1890-1930. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Carlston., Erin G. Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. 1999.
New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001.
Dettmar, Kevin J. H., ed. Rereading the New. Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1992.
Dettmar, Kevin J.H., ed. Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca & London: Cornell
University Press, 1990.
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1995.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: The University of
Oxford Press, 1975. 2000.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism. Theories of Representation and Difference. Ed. Teresa de
Lauretis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present.
New York: Verso, 2002.
Joannou, Maroula, ed. Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics, and History.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-
Century Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, Inc., 1925.
Sherry, Vincent. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists.
London & New York: Verso, 1989.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-
1930. 1931. New York & London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948.


Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway (Required)