Texts:

• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (Bantam)
• Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
• D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Oxford World's Classics)
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Bedford)
• Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harcourt Brace)
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt Brace)
• Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
• Muriel Spark, The Comforters (New Directions)

Course requirements: regular attendance and active participation, weekly small-group meetings in preparation for Friday's class, two short papers (3-4 pages each), and a longer paper (10-12 pages). I will expect to see you whenever you have questions or problems you'd like to talk about. My office hours are MW 2:30-4:00, TTh 1:30-3:00, and other times by appointment. I also regularly check my email (david.walker@oberlin.edu).

Preliminaries: This course has three primary goals: (1) to engage in close textual analysis of selected novels written during the Modernist period (roughly 1900-1945) in Great Britain and Ireland, (2) to use these texts to investigate the nature of Modernism more broadly, and (3) to train you in methods of literary analysis through reading, discussion, and writing. It will explore a number of complex philosophical, psychological, and political issues, including the nature of the self, the understanding and representation of consciousness, the devastating effects of the First World War as they were reflected in literature, and the response to the decline of Britain's prestige as a world power. Fundamentally, though, this is a literature class, by which I mean that we will treat the texts as distinctively imaginative creations, rather than simply as products of social and historical forces. I've chosen these particular books because I hope they will all repay attention to their artistic qualities, and I'll be asking you to pay close attention to their experiments in language and form as well as to their thematic content. We will certainly raise theoretical questions about the nature and dynamics of fiction, and I will be asking you to do some reading in the criticism, but the bulk of our attention will be on the primary works themselves. Please be sure that's the sort of course you want to take.

There are a couple of other issues I'd like you to consider carefully before deciding to take this class. The reading load is fairly heavy; I hope it won't feel unfair or burdensome, but it's crucial that you have the time to do all the reading carefully and thoughtfully, so I would urge you not to take this class concurrently with another course in the novel. My teaching tends to be quite text-centered; you should bring the book under discussion to class every day and prepare to refer to it frequently.

I will expect active participation in discussion from each member of the class; this means, first of all, preparing carefully, noting issues in the day's reading that seem to you particularly worth talking about. (I strongly encourage you to write all over your text as you read: making notes to yourself, marking passages that seem especially important or problematic, etc.) It also means listening and responding thoughtfully to each other in class, not just talking to hear yourself talk. Good discussion in a class this size doesn't usually happen automatically; it depends on everyone's willingness to cultivate the skills required. I'd like this class to feel like a genuine community, and for each of you to be committed to bringing that about.

Schedule of class meetings and assignments:

M 2/7	Introduction
W 2/9	Heart of Darkness (1902), pp. 3-64 (midpage)
F 2/11	pp. 64-132
M 2/14	The Good Soldier (1915), parts 1-2
W 2/16	part 3
F 2/18	part 4
M 2/21	short paper #1 due in class Women in Love (1921), ch. 1-8
W 2/23	ch. 9-14
F 2/25	ch. 15-19
M 2/28	ch. 20-24
W 3/1	ch. 25-29
F 3/3	ch. 30-31
M 3/6	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), ch. 1
W 3/8	ch. 2
F 3/10	ch. 3
M 3/13	ch. 4
W 3/15	ch. 5
F 3/17	Read pp. 235-67; Panel discussion on psychoanalytic criticism
M 3/20	Read pp. 268-325; Panel discussions on reader-response and feminist criticism
W 3/22	Read pp. 326-90; Panel discussions on deconstruction and new historicism
F 3/24	short paper #2 due in class

3/25 &endash; 4/2 SPRING BREAK

M 4/3	The Garden Party (1922): "At the Bay"
W 4/5	"The Garden Party," "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," "Marriage à la Mode"
F 4/7	"The Voyage," "Miss Brill," "The Singing Lesson," "The Stranger," "An Ideal Family"
M 4/10	A Passage to India (1924), ch. I-VIII
W 4/12	ch. IX-XXII
F 4/14	ch. XXIII-XXXII
M 4/17	ch. XXXIII-XXXVII
W 4/19	To the Lighthouse (1927), Part I, ch. 1-10
F 4/21	ch. 11-19
M 4/24	Part II; Part III, ch. 1-3
W 4/26	ch. 4-13
F 4/28	TBA
M 5/1	Brighton Rock (1938), parts 1-2
W 5/3	parts 3-6
F 5/5	part 7
M 5/8	The Comforters (1957), ch. I-III
W 5/10	ch. IV-VI
F 5/12	ch. VII-IX
T 5/16	longer paper due