ENGL 256 - Modern British and Irish Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

British and Irish Literature from the first half of the 20th century. The mix and focus of genres, topics and authors varies depending on the instructor. However, the period in question covers such writers as Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Vera Brittain, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, and Graham Greene.

Topic for 2026/27b: Modern Times.

“Your genus is worldwide, your spacest sublime! But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?” – James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

This semester we survey some of the great works of British Modernism through the lens of time. Our syllabus covers Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and Katherine Mansfield’s short fiction. In breaking from the literary conventions of their Victorian predecessors, in interrogating the transparency of language, the communicability of experience, and the very possibility of telling a story from beginning to end, each of these authors also shatters received ideas about how time orders the day and the night, the past and the future, and the ephemeral present. In their texts, the time of capitalist industry, the linear succession of empty moments and the forward march of progress, is interrupted, splintered, stuttered, folded, delayed, speeded up, and brought to a standstill. We supplement our literary readings with contemporaneous reflections on temporality, including short selections from Lewis’s Time and Western Man, Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Heesok Chang.

Prerequisite(s): AP credit or one unit of First-Year English.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS