Annotation
The aim of the course is to introduce the students to the representative works of Anglo-American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. The choice of literary works reflects their importance for the period and also the richness and variety of themes and approaches. Themes:
1. Edwardian period and British Modernism E.M. Forster: “The Story of a Panic”/ “The Machine Stops”, Virginia Woolf: “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street”, “The Mark on the Wall”, Katherine Mansfield: The “Garden Party”, T.S. Eliot: “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”, vybrané ukázky: James Joyce: “The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”
2. British literature from the 1930s to 1960s: George Orwell: “A Hanging”, Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim, Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
3. Postmodernism in British Literature: A.S Byatt: Possession
4. British literature from the 1980s until today: Hanif Kureishi: “Weddings and Beheadings”/ The Buddha of Suburbia (excerpts), Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go, Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending/ The Only Story
5. 20th-century British drama: Harold Pinter: The Room, Caryl Churchill: Top Girls, Jezz Butterworth: Jerusalem
6. British poetry from the 1940s until today: Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Benjamin Zephaniah, Carol Ann Duffy – selected poems
7. American Realist and Naturalist prose from the beginning of the 20th century: the muckracking novel (Upton Sinclair: The Jungle, excerpts), dystopian visions (Jack London: The Scarlet Plague)
8. American modernism: The Jazz Age (Francis Scott Fitzgerald: “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”), minimalism (Ernest Hemingway: “Cat in the Rain”), stream of consciousness (Gertrude Stein: Paris France, excerpts)
9. Post-war and contemporary American fiction – Flannery O’Connor: “The Displaced Man”, the New Journalism (Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, excerpts), John Updike: “Bech in Czech”
10. American literary Postmodernism: David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest
11. 20th century American drama: Arthur Miller: The Crucible, Sam Shepard: True West, August Wilson: Fences
12. American poetry from WWII until today: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sylvia Plath, John Ashberry, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Pinsky, Peter Pereira – selected poems