Mar 28, 2024  
Catalogue 2020-2021 
    
Catalogue 2020-2021 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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ENGL 357 - Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)


In-depth study of literatures of the twentieth century, with primary focus on British and postcolonial (Irish, Indian, Pakistani, South African, Caribbean, Australian, Canadian, etc.) texts. Selections may focus on an author or group of authors, a genre (e.g., modern verse epic, drama, satiric novel, travelogue), or a topic (e.g., the economics of modernism, black Atlantic, Englishes and Englishness, themes of exile and migration).

Topic for 2020/21a: Lost In Translation: Some Other Modern Novels. translate (verb): early 14c., “to remove from one place to another,” also “to turn from one language to another,” from Old French translater and directly from Latin translatus ”carried over,” serving as past participle of transferre ”to bring over, carry over” (see transfer), from trans ”across, beyond” (see trans-) + lātus “borne, carried” 

We read some great modern prose fiction that is, as far as I’m aware, rarely taught at Vassar: Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., Anna Seghers’s Transit, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles,  Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, Virgina Woolf’s The Waves, some short stories by Franz Kafka, Mary Butts, Augusto Monterosso, Robert Walser, and others. This selection seeks to ramify our understanding of what modernity meant for diverse human bodies in and around the world. Several of these texts are read in English translation. The theme of translation itself – as literary praxis, ethical task, stance in being, and means of travel – frames and dislocates our inquiry. Heesok Chang.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS



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