Western Contemporary Literature Course Description
Course Title: Western Contemporary Literature
Course Prerequisites: The History of English Literature
Course Follow-ups: American Literature; British Literature
Credit: 2.0
Total Semester Credit Hours: 32
Lecture Hours: 32
Experiment/Computer Hours: 0
School: School of Foreign Studies
Major: English
Course Description:
Western Contemporary Literature involves 1960s and 1970s literary landscapes which were inseparable from the history and the culture at that time. Since the Second World War, there have appeared a great number of anti-war writers most of whom experienced the cruelty of the battlefields and wrote about that terrifying life. Western society also saw the emergence of such social movements as the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Counter-culture Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, the fast development of science in the west brought about many social problems, resulting in fierce conflict between technological alienation and ethics. Such a volatile world produced countless public intellectuals whose works were intended to explore bloody wars and racial discrimination, to raise people’s awareness of gender inequality and to expose the existential crisis caused by environmental degradation. It is of great significance in this course, to focus on such a group of prominent authors and their achievements, and to illustrate the condition of the western world at that time.
Textbooks and Course Materials:
1. 聂珍钊. 20世纪西方文学[M]. 北京：北京师范大学出版社，2012. (Nie, Z. The Western Literature in the 20th Century. Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press, 2012.)
2. 朱虹．西方文化与文学艺术[M]．北京：中国社会科学出版社，2014．(Zhu, H. The Arts in Western Culture and Literature. Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 2014.)
Written by: Jing Xingmei
