LBCL 490 — The Twentieth Century and Beyond: Forms and Critiques
Liberal Arts College, Concordia University
Prof. Ariela Freedman
SAVE 10 PERCENT WHEN YOU BUY THE BOOK PACKAGE
This book package includes all required books for LBCL 490 for the Fall 2026 semester.
Buying the full package ensures you have every text you need from the start of the term.
This package includes the following titles
Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
Ulysses, James Joyce
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud
Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam
The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
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The opening volume of Proust's monumental novel follows the narrator's childhood memories and Charles Swann's obsessive love affair, launching a meditation on memory and time.
Controversial, scandalous, erudite and funny, Ulysses is undisputedly a landmark of twentieth-century modernism. It charts one day – 16th June 1904 – in the lives of three inhabitants of Dublin: the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, the artist Stephen Dedalus and Bloom’s wife Molly. Their peregrinations, thoughts and encounters form the basis of the narrative, which becomes a celebration of all human experience through the lives of specific individuals in a specific place at a specific time. Ulysses is both an experimental novel and a book intimately concerned with the events of modern life.
A lively repository of literary allusion and colloquial realism, this dazzlingly innovative, ambitious novel is here presented in its 1939 Odyssey Press version, which is regarded as the most accurate text published in Joyce’s lifetime. This edition also includes over 9,000 notes by Joyce scholars Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.
Virginia Woolf's novel follows Clarissa Dalloway through a single June day in London, moving fluidly between her present and memory as she prepares to host a party.
Faulkner's novel uses fifteen alternating narrators to follow a poor family's journey to bury their matriarch, turning a simple task into a meditation on grief and endurance.
In what remains one of his most seminal papers, Freud considers the incompatibility of civilisation and individual happiness, and the tensions between the claims of society and the individual. We all know that living in civilised groups means sacrificing a degree of personal interest, but couldn't you argue that it in fact creates the conditions for our happiness? Freud explores the arguments and counter-arguments surrounding this proposition, focusing on what he perceives to be one of society's greatest dangers; 'civilised' sexual morality. After all, doesn't repression of sexuality deeply affect people and compromise their chances of happiness?
The story of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who suffered continuous persecution under Stalin, but whose wife constantly supported both him and his writings until he died in 1938. Since 1917 The Modern Library prides itself as The Modern Library of the World's Best Books. Featuring introductions by leading writers, stunning translations, scholarly endnotes and reading group guides. Production values emphasize superior quality and readability. Competitive prices, coupled with exciting cover design make these an ideal gift to be cherished by the avid reader. Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nineteen as the wife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, Osip Mandelstam, and forty-two as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth." So writes Joseph Brodsky in his appreciation of Nadezhda Mandelstam that is reprinted here as an Introduction. Hope Against Hope was first published in English in 1970. It is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with Osip, who was first arrested in 1934 and died in Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38. Hope Against Hope is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin's Soviet Union and one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. But it is also a profound inspiration--a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances.
This collection gathers Kafka's short fiction, including 'The Metamorphosis' and 'A Hunger Artist,' exploring alienation and bureaucratic absurdity.
Borges's story collection blends philosophy and literary invention in labyrinthine tales that question reality, authorship, and infinite knowledge.