English 361: Modern Fiction

"... take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity ...
face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths ...
have as one's only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty ..."
Milan Kundera



Joint Day and Weekend--Fall Trimester 2001
Tuesday Evenings: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Associate Professor Cass Dalglish
Office
Memorial 224
Tuesday: 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Wednesday: by appointment
Thursday 4:45 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.
Phone: 612-330-1009
dalglish@augsburg.edu

Course Goals | Topics and Readings | Grading | Before First Class



Course Goals

The course will be a bit like a trip: We'll work our way around the world, from Ireland to Europe to Argentina to Africa to China, slipping between the personal and the political, across gender and culture, through identity and imagination. In other words, we'll start our journey with writers who rejected absolutes and bent the lines between reality and illusion, and we'll go on from there. We'll be traveling in a vehicle called "fiction," so we will also take the time to inspect how the novel and the story are put together and what impact that creative engineering has on us as we read. That will cause us to notice that there are a number of different ways to read fiction, and we'll explore different critical approaches as we read, research, discuss, and write about the works we cover in this course. We will spend some time considering the meaning of the expression "modern" and what we mean when we talk about "modern fiction." We'll also want to know what we mean by "colonial," because in this course we will begin in the modern fictional moment of the twentieth century -- a time when the colony still thrived -- and move into what some call the postmodern, postcolonial world in which we find ourselves today (Is the modern period over? Is the world really postcolonial?).

We have specific objectives to meet in Eng. 361:

  • This course fulfills the General Education Perspective in Intercultural Awareness and that perspective encourages us to look at both the fictional and the real worlds from points of view other than our own. We will be reading the works of authors of different cultures, religions, races, genders, creative philosophies, and political persuasions. We'll be applying "readings" that encourage us to try on new ways of seeing and understanding.
  • The course fulfills the General Education Skills Requirement in Writing. In order to meet that requirement, we will do a good deal of writing, plunge into bibliographical research on the fictions and themes we cover in the course, and pay close attention to documentation as we discuss and write about specific fictional works and as we review critical analyses of those works.
  • This course requires us to read a great deal of fiction, and that's one of the most enjoyable activities available to human beings.



    Topics and Readings

    As you read the works selected for this course, you may find yourself noticing a course theme that plays on the tension between the individual and her... or his... community. In his introduction to Classics of Modern Fiction, critic Irving Howe has written that the moderns were fascinated not with a specific, real world but with their subjective impressions of the world. Their fascination resembles the current media and advertising notion that the "real" is simply what is "perceived." We'll be looking for this reliance on the self and noticing when it alienates characters from society in a fiction, when it reinforces Kate Millett's notion that the personal is the political, and when it has some other impact on the individual's place in his... or her ... society. We'll read more of Irving Howe's description of the Moderns and we'll read essays by other critics and scholars. Some of these I will give you in handouts; others you will bring in as you complete bibliographical research on the authors, their work, themes, and cultures. You are invited to find additional themes that run through our readings and to share them with the class as we read the following required texts:

  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, "Text, Criticism and Notes," edited by Chester G. Anderson.
  • Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology, by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Anthony Kerrigan.
  • How I Came to Know Fish, by Ota Pavel, translated by Jindriska Badal and Robert McDowell.
  • Identity, by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher.
  • Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
  • The Joys of Motherhood, by Buchi Emecheta.
  • White Snake and other stories, by Geling Yan, translated by Lawrence Walker.

    Grading

    Grading will be based on an average of the grades you earn on the following assignments:

  • Reading and discussion. You have the right to remain silent, but if you are, you'll have a low grade in the "discussion" column. Read all the works, read secondary critical sources on the works when you can, come to class, and be actively "present" in the discussions. Absences will result in lower "discussion" grades and excessive absences (more than 3) will result in a failing grade regardless of the quality of other work.
  • Weekly quizzes. No makeup quizzes. You may drop the lowest two grades.
  • Three ( 4-6 pages) essays. One of these may be written as a work of fiction that reflects the work(s) being discussed; we will talk about this possibility in class. One of these must be presented to the class as a short oral introduction to the class discussion. (Summarize for the class but hand the written paper in). Because this is a "W" course, all papers must be at least 2.0 for the General Education Skill.
  • Final Exam.
  • A literary cross-cultural experience (a reading by an author from a different country, a play or film by an author from a Latin American, African, Asian or other non-U.S., non-dominant culture. Hand in a short paper discussing the event and your perception of it. Feel free to discuss the literary aspects as well.

    Written and oral presentations will be graded for content and form. You will want to check out style sheets on the Augsburg Library Styleguides Page. Creative pieces must include an additional page detailing how the work reflects the works being discussed.

    Before First Class

    Before we meet the first time, buy your copy of A Protrait in the bookstore and bring it to class. Although WEC students are accustomed to completing assignments before the first session, day students are not. So we will not have a pre-course assignment. The full list of assignments for the term will be available at the first session.



    Cass Dalglish, Ph.D.


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