In this advanced literature course you will experience the rewards of close reading, analysing and debating groundbreaking novels and poetry from the 1920s and 30s that made an impact upon publication, be it through experiments with style or the topics the writers chose to explore. Novels and poetry include Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (1922), Passing by Nella Larsen (1929), Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys (1939) and poetry by T.S. Eliot and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

This course explores how critical and narrative theory can add insight to your reading and help you appreciate literature at a deeper interpretative level. Through our readings of modern fiction (Jean Rhys, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath), we will examine how feminist, queer, post-colonial and narrative theory offer lenses that enrich our understandings of these works.

The novella is a genre that resists classification. Hovering between a short story and a novel, this fictional form has occupied a prominent place in literary culture since the nineteenth century. This course explores the enduring appeal of the novella, focusing on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). It examines how three American authors have expressed the female experience at a crucial time in women’s history.

We explore iconic tales of Hollywood in the 1930s, 60s and 70s with narrators that disrupt, transgress and tell us stories.

Explore the challenges of close reading and critical thinking through a study of The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion and Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh and L.A. by Eve Babitz.