21L.485 20th-Century Fiction, Fall 2002
Joseph Conrad. (Illustration courtesy of Barbara Thorburn.)
Highlights of this Course
This course features
readings,
essay assignments and
exams addressing twentieth-century fiction, including an extended list of suggested paper topics.
Course Description
Tradition and innovation in representative fiction of the early modern period. Recurring themes: the role of the artist in the modern period, the representation of psychological and sexual experience, the virtues (and defects) of the aggressively experimental character of so many modern books. Works by such writers as Conrad, Kipling, Isaac Babel, Kafka, James, Lawrence, Mann, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.