Questions Surrounding Modernity
The focus on literary movements and influences continues in a unit rife with historical and literary significance. The transition from the Victorian mindset—one questioning society’s rigid morality and industrial progress—to the Modernist’s views of life’s struggles—its absurdities and its importance to the individual—will take center stage. You will slowly and deeply investigate the Modernist view of life first in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; the main readings will be Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (March 5/6) and Albert Camus’s The Stranger (translated by Matthew Ward) (March 19/20). These novels will be discussed through the lens of the critical essays that accompany the Stanley Corngold translation of The Metamorphosis and several essays by and about Camus, including his Nobel acceptance speech and excerpts from The Myth of Sisyphus. Class discussions and freewrites will center on Existentialism, Absurdism, and their relationship to the changing views of life in a modern world. The second in-class timed write will ask students to discuss the relevance of the ideas in Camus's various philosophical writings to both The Stranger and The Metamorphosis.
Outside Reading for Unit 5 (please select from this list for outside reading or run your choice by me):
Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad [100 pp.]
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) or Dubliners (1914), by James Joyce [275, 200 pp.]
Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), or The Waves (1931), by Virginia Woolf [220, 200, 200 pp.]
Siddhartha (1922) or Steppenwolf (1928), by Hermann Hesse [150, 225 pp.]
Nausea (1938) or No Exit (1944), by Jean-Paul Sartre [50 pp. +??, 190 pp.]
Waiting for Godot (1953), by Samuel Beckett [100 pp.]
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon [160 pp.]
The Sympathizer (2016), by Viet Thanh Nguyen [380 pp.]