We currently have seats available in the following English department courses. All are open to non-majors at this time and could appeal to any student interested in 20th-century literature and/or culture.  Thanks for your help!

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ENGL 213: MODERNIST LITERATURE AND CULTURE
MWF 10:00-10:50
CRN: 46720
UIUC: Literature and the Arts course , and UIUC: Western Compartv Cult course
This course will examine one of the most provocative, experimental, and challenging periods in literary history. The early decades of the twentieth century saw rapid technological innovation, global political upheaval, radical transformations in gender roles, and the traumas of two world wars. The literature and art of the period captured these turbulent cultural experiences through extreme formal experimentation. This course will survey the key works that defined the modernist and avant-garde movements; we will examine novels, poetry, film, and manifestos by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Charlie Chaplain, Samuel Beckett, and others.

ENGL 242: POETRY SINCE 1940
TR 9:30-10:45
CRN: 40992
The first necessity of poetry, Allen Grossman contends, “is the transmission of the human image.” Our survey of poetry since 1940 begins with poetic responses to the crises of the human image around the time of World War II. It then ventures across the remainder of the 20th century, studying different poetry movements and tracing how they lean toward the contemporary scene. Examples of such movements include the Beat poets, the Deep Image poets, the New York School, Language Poetry, and poets associated with ecopoetry and multiculturalism. The aim of the course is to reflect on the possible links between, on the one hand, the changing forms of poetic action as a means for making the image of persons and, on the other hand, the questions of human valuing.

ENGL 300: WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE
“Strange Fathers: Race and Paternity in Asian American Poetry”
TR 11:00-12:15
CRN: 33987
Advanced Composition Course
NOW OPEN TO NON-MAJORS!
What do paternal identifications reveal about questions of race and gender? This writing course explores how images of the father shape identities, in the work of three major Asian American poets: Li Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and Eugene Gloria. Short extracts drawn from the critical work on fatherhood and subjectivity accompany the discussions of individual poetry collections. Students will learn the basic critical tools for talking about poems, and write poetry criticism for different kinds of readers.

ENGL 374: ANGLOPHONE WORLD CINEMA
“England From Recovery to Cool Britannia and Back Again (1955-1980)”
TR 12:30-2:20
CRN 61944
Even if they are not meant to be documentaries, films made in other countries in other eras inevitably serve as windows on the worlds that they represent. Through such films we can learn not only about social conditions but also about the people’s values, dreams, and ambitions. While class, race, region, politics, sexuality, and gender inflect our lives in the United States, each of these, due to England’s longer history, has an even greater influence on English lives. During the 25 years covered by this course, England emerged from the destruction of World War II, lost an Empire, was opened to immigrants, changed fashion, and discovered drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Rationing, ugly buildings, dowdy clothing, and a hidebound class system characterized England in the late 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, English people had an experience rather like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz: they emerged from a dark gray world into one of brilliant neon colors. Through the films we will view, we will learn about what English life was like in these two decades, and then we will see what happened after.

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