ENGL 7366, Preseminar in British Modernism: Children of Empire
Professor Margot Backus
713-743-2970, mbackus@uh.edu
Modernism is one of the most celebrated of world literary movements. With its high
formal and aesthetic aspirations, its notorious difficulty, and its uncompromising
rejection of the generic conventions and social and political norms that preceded it,
modernism represents the idealistic efforts of writers and artists situated largely, though
by no means exclusively in western metropolitan centers to come to grips with the
pressures that rapid economic, social and technological transformations were exerting in
every area of human lived experience. Modernism is thus of central importance both in
the canon of literature in English and for a boarder cultural studies approach to western
modernity. In this seminar, modernist engagements with the urban, metropolitan settings
of London, Dublin and Paris will be juxtaposed with modernist representations of various
peripheral spaces, including India and Australia, a coalmining village in Wales, and the
battlefields and trenches of World War I. Our readings will emphasize representations of
childhood and youth, allowing for an ongoing discussion of modernism’s contributions to
the twentieth century’s evolving views concerning children’s inner lives, norms
concerning socialization, education and family life, and the evolving place of children in
a rapidly evolving social realm .
Assignments:
1. Coming to all seminars prepared and willing to contribute to thoughtful
discussion (20% of final grade)
2. Select article, compile bibliography, and lead 1-hour discussion (10% of final
grade)
3. 8-10 page conference-length paper (20% of final grade)
4. 18-25 page formal, article-length essay (50% of final grade)
Sample Syllabus
Thursday Jan 16
Course introduction, presentation sign-up, article hand-outs
for Dorian Gray.
Thursday Jan 23
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Thursday Jan 30
Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
“The Stolen Child”
“The Dolls”
“September 1913”
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”
“Easter, 1916”
“Among School Children”
“The Circus Animal’s Desertion”
Thursday Feb 6
Dubliners, James Joyce
Thursday Feb 13
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Thursday Feb 20
Kim, Rudyard Kipling (1901)
Thursday Feb 27
Sons and Lovers, D.H Lawrence (1913)
Thursday Mar 6
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
and “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot
Thursday Mar 13
The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall
Conference-length short paper due
Thurday Mar 20
Spring Break
Thursday Mar 27
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories.
Thursday Apr 3
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Thursday Apr 10
The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen
Thursday Apr 17
Frost in May, Antonia White
Thursday Apr 24
The Land of Spices, Kate O’Brien