Sections offered FALL 2023:
#34864 |
HERBERT MARKS |
MW 3:00pm-5:30pm
|
BH 209 |
CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; meets with CMLT-C 338
Literature in our own time has had to thrive as best it can in the shadow of the great achievements of Modernism. Writers working in the late ’40s and ’50s had to confront–or evade–the trauma of recent history, while those who followed were left with a sense of belatedness in a changing world, where the preeminence of literature itself was being challenged. Perhaps in response, the best writing of the last seventy years seems to gravitate toward opposing extremes of concentration and distension, of control and abandonment, while sharing a commitment to formal innovation and a heightened sense of self-consciousness. In this course, we shall be looking at how these tendencies expressed themselves in some of the most significant works (dramatic, poetic, and narrative) written in Europe and America since 1950.
Readings: Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, and Thomas Bernhard, among others.
Written work: a ten-page paper and a final exam.