LIT3124 - Spring 2025 - Rebecca Ballard

This course is a survey of literature written in English from 1800 to the present, covering major literary periods and movements across centuries, continents, genres, and cultural contexts. Our readings will center on different manifestations of what Thomas Hardy called “the ache of modernism,” or what Karl Marx described as “all that is solid melts into air”: in other words, we will trace how literature wrestles with the many transformations of modernity, and how literary representations of human experience register profound geopolitical, social, scientific, technological, philosophical, and ecological changes. You will learn to draw on historical and cultural contexts alongside aesthetic questions of form and style as you interpret literary works. You will also explore how the literary history we encounter speaks to our present, and how the cultural moment in which we find ourselves today fits in the longer arc of modernity.