Course details

Name: ENLT - 376

Title: MODERN EUROPEAN NOVEL

Section: 01

Semester: Fall - 2017

Credits: 3

Description:
How can one challenge past traditions and conventions and still retain a sense of self? Yet what is so wrong with modern life that the tyrannies of the past--bourgeois family, gender inequality, and oppressive laws--still seem to haunt the present? During the so-called Modernist period--ca. 1910 to 1930--writers and intellectuals pondered these same questions, ones that we still consider today. In five notable novels, we will read and discuss characters who find themselves caught between things—between two world wars, between individualism and society, between male and female identity, between national borders, and between desire and reason. Students will leave this course with a profound appreciation for the ways in which the novel has evolved from 1866 to 1984. In order to understand the past and future of Modernist novelists (Hesse [Steppenwolf], Breton [Nadja], and Kafka [The Trial]), we will read a predecessor (Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment) and a successor (Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being).

BOOK LIST:

Breton, Nadja. Grove: 978-0802150264

Dostoevsky, F. Crime and Punishment. 3rd Ed. Norton: 978-0-393-95623-8

Kundera, M. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper Perennial: 978-0061148521

Hesse, H. Steppenwolf. Picador: 978-0312278670

Kafka, F. The Trial. Schocken: 978-0805209990

Last updated on 2017-03-25 By Nielsen Wendy (nielsenw)

Schedule: Tuesday,Thursday From 11:30 am To 12:45 pm

Graduation requirements:

  • Any Literature (1e)
  • Genre Study (Fiction)
  • ()
  • ()
  • Post-1900 (1d)
  • International Issues (3a)
  • Women and Gender Studies (3c)

Teaching Faculty: Nielsen Wendy (nielsenw)

Is course canceled: No