Course Descriptions

ENG 202 - Modern British Literature

3 Credits

The second of a two-part survey of English-language literature written in and around the United Kingdom, this course examines texts from 1785 to the present, paying close, critical attention to inherited literary traditions and the ways writing informs identity and vice versa. Approaching the traditional canon with an eye toward representational equity, inclusion, and social justice, students will consider questions of power, privilege, oppression, and opportunity and read historically marginalized, colonized, and BIPOC voices as central to British Literature. Students will study literary movements such as Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, and Post-modernism, as well as texts in translation that have influenced the development of literature in English. Topics discussed may include Industrialism, War, the rise of the New Woman, colonialism and post-colonialism, and the immigrant experience. Possible texts include Blake's illustrated Songs of Innocence and Experience, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Jean Rys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Salman Rushdie's "The Prophet's Hair," and Zadie Smith's, "The Waiter's Wife."

Prerequisite(s): English 101 with a C or better, or placement into English 200, or instructor permission.

New SUNY General Education: SUNY - Diversity: Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice, SUNY - Humanities

Retiring SUNY General Education: SUNY-H - Humanities (SHUM)

MCC General Education: MCC-AH - Arts and Humanities (MAH)

Course Learning Outcomes
1. Interpret British literature written from 1785 to the present as part of a complex network of social structures, systems, and movements that have been and continue to be responsible for the creation and perpetuation of the dynamics of power, privilege, oppression, and opportunity.
2. Analyze the ways British literature represents and contributes to the development of individual, group, and cultural identities, including colonial and post-colonial identities.
3. Analyze how historically marginalized writers living under British imperial rule have used writing as an act of socio-political resistance and to enact social justice.
4. Interpret British literature using critical lenses that include, but are not restricted to, race, ethnicity, class, LGBTQ+, and disability perspectives.
5. Compose arguments supported by primary and secondary sources that connect principles of social justice to the authorship/writing of British Literature and/or the students' act of studying and writing about British literature.

Course Offered Spring

Use links below to see if this course is offered:
Fall Semester 2024
Intersession 2025
Spring Semester 2025