English Literature, 20th-century to the present
Course description
English Literature, 20th-century to the present, invites students to consider major instances of the interplay between continuities and ruptures that restructured the literary canon in England, in a century of intense formal experimentation. Beginning with three salient moments in the work of T. S. Eliot (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” [1915], “Tradition and the Individual Talent” [1919], and The Waste Land [1922]), an approach to English modernism will then focus on Virginia Woolf’s fictional biography Orlando (1928). The programme will later turn to two notable examples of hybrid form in English literary postmodernism: the interaction between word and image in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta (1982-9), which imagined a dystopian future for Britain; and the introduction of new voices in a postcolonial context, in Bernardine Evaristo’s anachronistic re-imagination of Roman Britain in her verse novel The Emperor’s Babe (2001).
Grading and assessment
The analysis of the texts is always done in dialogue with the students, paying special attention to aspects that may shed light on the relation between the specific texts and the English literary tradition. Students will be expected to have read the primary texts in English for the appropriate classes and to be prepared to discuss them orally and critically in detail.
This class and its evaluation will be in English.
Evaluation: two written tests (40% + 40%), with the possibility of replacing one of the tests with a written essay, and quality of oral participation (20%).
Bibliography
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems. 1909-1962. Faber and Faber, 2002. ISBN: 9780571105489.
Evaristo, Bernardine. The Emperor’s Babe. Penguin, 2020 [2001]. ISBN: 9780241989845.
Moore, Alan & David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. DC Comics, 2009. ISBN: 9781779511195.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Third edition. Oxford UP, 2004. ISBN: 9780195672640.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Ed. Michael H. Whitworth. Oxford UP, 2015. ISBN: 9780199650736.
Programme of English Literature, 20th-century to the present, TP1.pdf