LIT 3124 Spring 2020 Epstein

This course will introduce students to literature in English from the 19th to the early 21st century, as we trace the evolution of literature through a series of major movements and key developments – from Romanticism to the flowering of American literature in the mid-19th century, to realism, modernism, postmodernism, and very recent contemporary writing. While the course focuses on honing skills of close reading and literary analysis, we will also be situating these works within their historical, cultural, and political contexts, as we explore how representative literary texts respond to a dramatically changing, modernizing world. Special attention will be paid to how modern literature innovates with form and subject matter, as it wrestles with issues of race, gender, sexuality, and politics. Authors will likely include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Amiri Baraka, Thomas Pynchon, Claudia Rankine, among others.