This class focuses on the literature (novels, short stories and plays, mostly) of the “modern” period, the dates of which are somewhat under dispute, but which generally fall between the early 20th century and the present day. We will be spending the majority of our time in class discussing the literature and the historical context (social, economic, political) in which it was written. It's a fun class, largely because there are so many themes that touch us as "modern" people: youth culture, family dysfunction, race, urban isolation, existentialism, feminism, experimentation with form, world war, surrealism, the death of god, drug culture, social fragmentation, irony,  nihilism, and on and on.

For more information contact:
Mark Brosamer (Instructor)
Phone: (510) 659-6249
email: mbrosamer@ohlone.edu
Office: 8309 (building 8, 3rd floor)

 

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Some writers on writing:

Writers aren’t exactly people...they’re a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

      --F. Scott Fitzgerald
 

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

      --Wallace Stevens
 

Nine-tenths of the best poetry in the world has been written by poets less than thirty years old; a great deal more than half of it has been written by poets under twenty-five.

      --H.L. Mencken
 

I write fiction because it’s a way of making statements I can disown, and I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

      --Tom Stoppard