Dr. Barbara J. Burch
Georgetown College
English 478
Spring 1999

Office: 112 Pawling Hall
Office Hours: MWF 1-3
Phonemail: 8130
Email: Bburch@georgetowncollege.edu

Course Description: Survey of Modern British Literature: A study of British Poetry, Drama and Fiction written during the first half of the Twentieth Century. Class meetings will be devoted to close reading of the texts and lectures on the social and cultural context of assigned readings. Special attention will be paid to the critique of Victorianism, the literature of the First World War, and the aesthetics of Modernism.

Texts: The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

Course Requirements: Three short (6-7 pages) critical essays (15% each); Three exams (15% each); Quizzes and Class Participation (10%).

Attendance: I expect that you will attend class daily. Absence is acceptable only in the case of illness or a legitimate emergency. Each absence in excess of 3 will lower your final grade 3 points.

Academic Honesty: Cheating and plagiarism of any sort will not be tolerated in this course. If you cheat on an exam or written work, I will fail you for the course and report you to the Academic Dean.

Reading Schedule

Unit I -- Ex(or)cising the Victorians

Damp now began to make its way into every house . . .. The damp struck within. They felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds . . . The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence and thus--for there is no stopping damp; it gets into inkpots as it gets into the woodwork--se trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopedias in ten or twenty volumes.
Virginia Woolf

January

13 Course Introduction

13 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

15 Heart of Darkness

18 George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

20 Major Barbara

22 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

25 Rebecca West, "Indissoluble Matrimony"

27 Wyndham Lewis, Blast http://tori.ic.h.kyoto-u.ac.jp/pub/lewis/lewis.html

Unit II -- "In Time of Breaking Nations"

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth
For a botched civilization.
Ezra Pound "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly"

29 Thomas Hardy, "Channel Firing," "In Time of Breaking Nations"; Rupert Brooke "The Soldier"; Siegfried Sassoon "Glory of Women" "Everyone Sang"; Isaac Rosenberg "Break of Day in the Trenches"

See: http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/LostPoets

February

1 Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "Strange Meeting," "Dulce et Decorum Est"

3 T.E. Lawrence from "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" Robert Graves, "Goodbye to All That"

5 David Jones, from In Parenthesis

See: http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/dresch/index.html

15 EXAM

Unit III -- Bloomsbury, Modernism and the Art of Iconoclasm

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images
T. S. Eliot The Waste Land

The madly thoughtless shattering and dismantling of all foundations, their dissolution into a continual evolving that flows ceaselessly away, the tireless unspinning and historicising of all there has ever been by modern man, the great cross-spider at the node of the cosmic web - all this may concern and dismay moralists, artists, the pious, even statesmen; we shall for once let it cheer us.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

17 T. S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

For a brief biography of Eliot: http://www.hwwilson.com/eliot.html

For a useful Eliot site: http://www.deathclock.com/thunder/index.html

19 "Gerontion"

22 The Waste Land PAPER #1 DUE

For a hypertext version of The Waste Land: http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/

24 The Waste Land, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

26 W. B. Yeats "The Wild Swans at Cool" "The Second Coming" "A Prayer for My Daughter" "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"

For an online edition of much of Yeats's poetry:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5379/yeats_index.html

For Louise Bogan's biography of Yeats, published in The Atlantic a year before his death:

http://www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/atlweb/poetry/yeats/bogan.htm