En 311: Irish
and British Modern Fiction Office
Hours:
Fall 2001 M,
3-4:30; W 3-6
Pranav Jani Parker
Hall 302
pjani@wagner.edu x3362
The Crisis of
Self and Nation in Irish and British Modernism
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”
W.B.
Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Between the late 1800s
and the 1940s, things in Europe were indeed falling apart.
Industrialization, colonization, world wars, and revolutions instigated
an intense upheaval in society and corresponded, in turn, to a shift in the way
Europeans thought about society. “Modernism” is the name given to a diffuse
grouping of European art that broke sharply with the dominant conventions of
nineteenth-century art during this period.
In particular, this course examines Irish and English
modernist fiction, poetry, and drama in order to show how different writers
represented the emerging fault-lines of self and nation. While we will study canonical writers like
Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Yeats, the particular focus on issues of
nation and race (Irishness versus Englishness, European vs/ non-European) and
empire (colonizer vs. colonized) allows us to expose the tensions existing
within British modernism itself.
Required Texts
Mulk
Raj Anand, Untouchable
Joseph
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
E.M.
Forster, A Passage to India
Sean
O’Casey, Three Plays
George
Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House
Course Packet for En 311, Fall 2001 (CP)
Participation 20%
Response
Papers 10%
Paper #1 20%
Paper #2 20%
Paper #3 30%
You must attend all scheduled class
meetings. Further, you must be actively present by being prepared to
participate in class discussions, critique the readings, and express
opinions. As this is an Honors course,
the readings will be challenging and will require extra attention on your part.
You have three absences—excused or
unexcused—to use at your discretion.
For every absence after your second, your final grade will drop by
one-third. More than 3 absences may
result in an “F” in the course.
Your three response papers, not graded very heavily, should
be taken as preparation for the longer papers—which will constitute the
majority of your grade. Make use of the
many resources you have for getting ideas and writing papers. You can call the writing center at x3298 to
set up an appointment. You can also
contact me, either during my office hours or by email.
Any evidence of plagiarism or cheating will result in an “F”
for the course (not just the paper)
and disciplinary proceedings.
You must hand in all work on the
date it is due in order to receive full credit. This will require planning ahead on your part when you have
multiple papers due on the same day.
Late papers will be knocked down one-half of a grade for each day they
are late. Extensions will only be
granted in emergency situations and need to be cleared with me at least one
week before the paper is due.
M 8/27 Rudyard Kipling, “White Man’s Burden”
(1899)—CP
W
8/29 Contemporary
responses to Kipling, from http://www.boondocksnet.com/kipling/
F
8/31 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
from The Communist Manifesto
(1848)—CP
Charles
Darwin, from The Origins of Species
(1859)—CP
Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human (1878)—CP
Sigmund Freud, from The Interpretations of Dreams (1900)—CP
M 9/3 NO
CLASS: LABOR DAY
W 9/5 Essays on modernism—TBA
F 9/7 Frederic Jameson, “Modernism and
Imperialism”
M 9/10 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
(1902)
W 9/12 Conrad, Heart of Darkness
F 9/14 Conrad, Heart of Darkness
M 9/17 Conrad, Heart
W 9/19 Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa” (1977)—CP
F 9/21 Essays on Conrad—TBA
M 9/24 William Butler Yeats, early poems—CP
W 9/26 James Joyce, from Dubliners (1914)
F 9/28 Joyce, Dubliners
M 10/1 T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” (1917)
Plain text: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
Annotated: http://megahertz.njit.edu/~jrh7925/eliot/pruftitle.html
W 10/3 Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting” (1927)—CP
F 10/5 Woolf, “Modern Fiction” (1925)—CP
Due: Paper #1 (3-4 pages)
M 10/8 NO
CLASS: COLONIZERS’…UM…COLUMBUS DAY
T 10/9 Monday
classes
Voices from World War I—CP
See also: http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/LostPoets/
W 10/10 Voices from World War I—CP
F 10/12 Debate: The Role of Literature
M 10/15 George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House (1920)
W 10/17 Shaw, Heartbreak
House
F 10/19 Shaw, Heartbreak
House
Due: Response Paper #2 (1-2
pages)
M 10/22 Sean O’Casey, from Three Plays (1920s)
W 10/24 O’Casey, Three Plays
F 10/26 O’Casey, Three Plays
M 10/29 NO
CLASS: FALL BREAK
W 10/31 Yeats, middle poetry
Edward Said, “Yeats and
Decolonization” (1990)—CP
F 11/2 OPEN DATE
Due: Paper #2 (4-5 pages)
M 11/5 Katherine Mansfield, “The Garden Party”
(1922)—CP
W 11/7 Marianne Dekoven, “Modernism and Gender”
(1999)—CP
F 11/9 Woolf, “Professions for Women” (1931)—CP
M 11/12 E. M.
Forster, Passage to India (1924)
W 11/14 Forster, Passage
to India
F 11/16 Forster, Passage
to India
Due: Response Paper #3
(1-2 pages)
M 11/19 George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” (1936)
THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY
M 11/26 Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1936)
W 11/28 Anand, Untouchable
F 11/30 Anand, Untouchable
Leopold Senghor,
“New York”
M 12/3 Race, Power, and Identity
Due: Paper #3 (7-8 pages)