English 44B: A Survey of World Literature from the Early Modern Period to the Present

English 44B

Survey of World Literature: Early Modern to the Present

Fall 2023

*This is an online class taught asynchronously.

Section 931, CRN: 72926

Course Information

This course is an online course taught asynchronously, meaning there are no scheduled class meetings. All of the discussion and assignments will be completes in Canvas.

This literature survey course introduces students to a selection of some of the most impactful pieces of modern literature, and the historical context, through periods of Enlightenment, Neoclassicism, travel, encounter, colonization, slavery, war, resistance, emancipation, Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism. Read works by authors from around the world such as: Pu Songling, Zeami Motokiyo, Kong Shangren, Molière, Voltaire, Locke, Kant, Jefferson, Rousseau, Cao Xueqin, Bashō, Ramprasad Sen, Diderot, Swift, Goethe, Ghalib, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Marx, Maupassant, Nietzsche, Zola, Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Wordsworth, Ruben Dario, Christina Rossetti, Rosalía de Castro, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Kipling, Twain, Nguyễn Du, Liu E, Dostoyevski, Flaubert, Chekhov, Tagore, Ichiyō Higuchi, Pirandello, Woolf, Kafka, Eliot, Borges, Neruda, Camus, Yehuda Amichai, Derek Walcott.

Writers will forever look backwards into the past with what Harold Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence,” in order to take place in the eternal dialogue that crosses oceans spans centuries. As contemporary writers draw on the popular themes and forms of past eras to speak about the world today, an understanding of literary devices and terms becomes indispensable in a reader’s quest for meaning and beauty.      

The course will be centered on reading, analyzing and writing about short fiction, poetry, drama, and excerpts of longer fiction written between 1650 and the present, considering the historical circumstances that these texts grew out of and often respond to. As a literary survey course, as opposed to a composition course such as 1A, the largest bulk of the work is in reading and studying the texts, in order to respond in short answers and short essays on the midterm and final. We will be reading selections from a variety of genres and eras.

Important Dates

Day Class Begins: August 29, 2023  [Find the following dates in the Instructional Calendar or in the online Schedule of Classes by hovering over the deadlines link next to your class listing.]

Day Class Ends: December 19, 2023

Last Day to Drop with a refund: September 7, 2023

Last Day to Drop without a 'W' symbol: September 15, 2023

Last Day to Drop with a W or apply for leave of absence: November 20, 2023

Final Exam Date: December 19, 2023

Syllabus

You can access my Fall 2023 syllabus for the semester here! The downloadable PDF has the full schedule for the semester.