Capital and Modernity

English 250, the gateway course to the English major, provides an important venue in which students will 1) refine their skills in critical thinking and writing, 2) learn to analyze texts of various genres, and 3) research literary and cultural problems. Together, then, we will be seeking surprising discoveries with regard to texts and their contexts in order to make clear, contestable, and significant claims about those discoveries. That is the work of the critic. As critics, we will strive to avoid emotional and moralizing responses to texts in favor of intellectual ones. As writers, we will place special emphasis on the style and form of critical arguments as well as on the standards of evidence that are employed in such argumentation. In these ways, The Analysis of Literature provides a crucial foundation for the upper-division coursework that follows it.

This course, organized around the concept of cultural as well as material “exchange,” undertakes to foster an understanding of the relation between economic development and processes of social transformation in both the modern and postmodern periods. To this end, we will examine poetry, prose, films, and a play that not only celebrate but also criticize modernization and urbanization. Beginning with Blake’s response to the onset of modernity in London in his illustrated verse and Baudelaire’s to Paris in his innovative prose poems, we will proceed to concentrate on texts that address the Jazz Age (1920s), the Great Depression (1930s), and the post-colonial era (1950s-1970s), including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hughes’s early blues and later protest poems, Brecht’s parable about altruism and greed in The Good Woman of Setzuan, Ellison’s brilliantly subversive Invisible Man, and Salih’s disturbingly captivating Season of Migration to the North.

Texts to purchase:

• Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (New Directions)
• William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford)
• Bertolt Brecht, Good Woman of Setzuan (Minnesota)
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Vintage)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribner)
• Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (Heinemann)
• A Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, Chris Baldick, ed. (Oxford)
• Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford)
• Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers (Chicago)

We will also screen two films: Modern Times (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1936) and The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966). Students who wish to research either film should first acquire a copy.

Note: While you will need these specific editions for this course, you may wish to search the “marketplace” at amazon.com or abebooks.com for deep discounts. Too, any reputable handbook or dictionary of literary terms will be fine for our purposes--ask me for suggestions if you’re uncertain about a given text.