ENGL 12005 - Modern Selves

Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This course focuses on how the self has been represented over time in poetry, fiction, and drama. The course gives special attention to how literary expressions of selfhood and crises of the self have developed in relation to three contexts: first, to historical shifts in understanding and preoccupations, from the early modern to the postmodern world; second, to such cultural positions as are defined by gender, race, ethnicity, class, and national origin; and third, to the shaping influences of literary language and genres. Works studied may include texts by Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Henry James, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Malouf, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Paul Auster. [AH]