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 2023/24a: James Joyce’s Ulysses: One hundred years ago, Sylvia Beach, the intrepid American owner of a small bookshop in Paris, published James Joyce’s Ulysses, forever transforming what it was possible to say and do in a novel. It was almost universally recognized by the cognoscenti as an audacious achievement, a proof of concept for literary modernism. Numerous reviews addressed to wider reading publics spotlighted its formal chaos and moral obscenity (“All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words,” said The Sunday Express), ensuring its circulation as a succès de scandale and firing the imagination of academy guardians and state censors on both sides of the Atlantic. Following the small 1922 run of the Shakespeare and Company editions, Ulysses would not be legally available for purchase in the US for another eleven years, in the UK for another thirteen.

In this seminar we read Joyce’s shape-shifting novel chapter by chapter, paying attention to both its formal inventio – did Joyce invent, recycle, or destroy English literary styles? – and material delivery – that is, its rocky and colorful histories of publication: from its serialization in Margaret Anderson’s and Jane Heap’s The Little Review to its 1933 legal contestation (in which a judge from the Southern District of New York is enlisted as a close reader of the text) to the ongoing scholarly battle over what constitutes the “standard edition,” the so-called “Joyce Wars.” Heesok Chang.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS