Welcome to English 220 / 356: Novels since 1900.
I've been asked to convene and guest-lecture in this course for the second semester of 2008.
My name is Jack Ross. If you want to find out more about me, please check out the research page located here or the author page located here.
I have a PhD in English and Comparative Literature, and am also a published poet and novelist, so I'll be trying to approach the subject from both of these perspectives.
So what exactly is the course? Here's what's up on the university website:
Worth:
15.0 points
Description:
This course aims to help students enjoy recent fiction, which often requires a subtle reading strategy, and to develop their skills in literary criticism. The prescribed novels are chosen because they are enjoyable to read and challenging to analyse, but for variety we also range widely in terms of their dates and their countries of origin. The course places emphasis on close reading of the novels as texts. The first three novels studied will be Cather's My Antonia, Forster's A Passage to India and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Semester:
Semester 2
Lecturer:
Jack Ross
Reading/Texts:
Willa Cather, My Antonia (Virago)
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Penguin)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin)
John Barth, The Floating Opera / The End of the Road (Anchor/Doubleday)
Graham Greene, The Comedians (Penguin)
Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (Virago)
Louise Erdrich, Tracks (Picador)
Ian McEwan, Atonement (Vintage).
Assessment:
Coursework + exam
Prerequisites:
Any 30 points at Stage I in English
Restrictions:
ENGLISH 356
Description:
This course aims to help students enjoy recent fiction, which often requires a subtle reading strategy, and to develop their skills in literary criticism. The prescribed novels are chosen because they are enjoyable to read and challenging to analyse, but for variety we also range widely in terms of their dates and their countries of origin. The course places emphasis on close reading of the novels as texts. The first three novels studied will be Cather's My Antonia, Forster's A Passage to India and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Semester:
Semester 2
Lecturer:
Jack Ross
Assessment:
Coursework + exam
Prerequisites:
30 points at Stage II in English
Restrictions:
ENGLISH 220
There are some things in that course prescription I particularly respond to - above all, that phrase about helping you to "enjoy recent fiction." That's certainly the angle I'd like to stress in this short tour of the last hundred years of novel writing.
So all I ask of you, our prospective students (at any rate for the moment) is to read the books and see what you think of them. Then come along to tutorials ready to debate your views.
What I'm going to do is put up a homepage here for each of our eight authors, and another (linked) page for each of the nine novels. These will be easy accessible from the side of your screen, and will be updated periodically as new information and links come to hand.
When lectures start, I'll also be putting up notes about each session, together with information about tutorials and assignments which you can either print out or consult here online.
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