Odysseus’ Scar:
Time in Modern Literature and Film
EN3316
Tutor:
Prof. Tim Armstrong
Beginning with Erich Auerbach’s
classic analyses of time in Homer and Woolf, this
course will explore the way in which the flow of time, the uses of time, and
the experience of time are conceptualised in modern literature. Using recent research in the field, it aims
to relate the modernist understanding of time to changes in technology,
especially the rise of photography and cinema, and to theories of consciousness
and motion.
The bulk of the course will
focus on literary, philosophical and psychological texts of the modernist
period in which, in the work of Henri Bergson,
William James and others (including Einstein) time becomes ‘thickened’,
a topic for investigation rather than an assumed and constant vector. The
impact of technological and social developments on the sense of time – the
clock, wristwatch, telegraphic time-signals, uniform railway timetables,
international date and time agreements, time-and-motion study in industry,
cinema – will also be discussed. Other topics considered will include time and
linguistic tense; story and narration; memory and history; the time-loop plot.
The circle between technology and time will be completed with an analysis of
what might be seen as the inheritance of modernist experimentation in two
recent cinematic plots.
Students on the course will
develop their skills in the study of narrative; in the evaluation of arguments
about relations between literature and scientific and philosophical discourse;
and in the establishing of links between cultural context and literary text.
Teaching and Assessment The course will be
taught by two-hour seminars, some of which will have a short lecture element,
some of which will have student-led presentations.
It will be examined by one assessed essay of 3-4,000 words, submitted the first
day of the term following the course.
Students will also be required to submit one non-assessed essay of 2,500
words (the submission date is specified in the published assessment schedule).
The non-assessed essay will be returned to you with comments within two
weeks. Late work will be read to ensure
that it is of appropriate quality, but it may not receive a mark or comments.
In common with other courses, there is a 70%
attendance threshold, which means that if you miss more that three seminars
without good reason (e.g. illness), you may not be allowed to sit the exams and
will, as a consequence, fail the course.
Feedback If there are any issues you need to discuss
during the course, please contact the tutor.
At the end of the course, the usual anonymous questionnaire will be distributed.
Books you will
need to buy
Quite a few weeks of the
course are taught from handouts. Texts you need to buy include:
·
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Penguin and other editions);
·
Katherine
Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (Penguin);
·
Rebecca
West, The Return of the Soldier (Virago);
·
Ford
Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier (
·
William
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
(Vintage).
Henry James’s Selected
Tales, ed. John Lyon (Penguin) is also recommended, but a handout of ‘The
Jolly Corner’ will be available. There are library copies; the Faulkner novella
is also in the C20th volume of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Copies can usually be found second-hand in bookshops and on the web – other
editions are acceptable.
About
the remainder of this booklet
In
what follows you will find
·
a
week-by-week course description,
including relevant secondary reading.
·
associated topics which you might consider each
week (please add others yourself for seminars).
·
a
general list of further reading
which will useful for essays (again, please supplement).
·
a
list of non-assessed essay questions
(other topics may be negotiated with me).
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Please
collect handouts for weeks 1-2 from Department Office at beginning of term.
Week
1 Narrative
Time
·
Auerbach
on Homer and Woolf (from Mimesis, handout);
·
Virginia
Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Penguin)
Recommended background reading: Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse (1980)
Week
2 Time, Capitalism and Technology
·
Standardizing
time (time and motion in industry; railroads, telegraphy and international tele-time);
·
Marey, Muybridge and cinema;
·
Bergson’s
response to cine-time in Creative Evolution and Matter and Memory
(handouts).
·
Walter
Benjamin’s reading of Bergson in ‘On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire’
·
We will
also look at Chaplin’s film Modern Times.
Recommended background reading:
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983),
chs. 1, 5.
Week
3 Time,
attention and the stream of consciousness
·
William
James on the sense of time (from Principles of Psychology, h/o);
·
short
essays by May Sinclair and Dora Marsden (handouts)
·
Katherine
Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (Penguin)
Recommended background reading: Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983), ch.3; Tim
Armstrong, Modernism (2005), ch. 5.
Week
4 Forms
of the Continuous Present
·
Gertrude
Stein, ‘The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans’ (essay) and
extracts from The Making of Americans (novel); ‘Picasso’ (handouts)
·
Sartre
on Dos Passos and a sample of Dos Passos’s
work (handouts)
Recommended background reading: Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present (1967)
Week
5 Occultism and temporality
·
Henry
James, ‘The Jolly Corner’ (in Selected Tales, ed. John Lyon, Penguin – a
handout version will also be available);
·
Rudyard
Kipling, ‘Mrs Bathurst’ (h/o); Ezra Pound, ‘Three Cantos’ (poems, 1917, handout)
Recommended background reading: Pamela Thurschwell,
Literature, Technology and Magical
Thinking, 1880-1920 (2001), ch.3.
Week
6
Week
7 Frozen and fixed time, shell shock and
anamnesis
·
Rebecca
West, The Return of the Soldier (Virago)
Recommended background reading: Chris Feudtner,
‘Minds the Dead have Ravished: Shell-Shock, History and the Ecology of Disease
Systems’. History of Science 31
(1993): 377-420.
Week
8 Tangled
histories, dubious narrators
·
Ford
Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier (Dover Thrift Editions)
Recommended background reading: Roger Poole,
‘The Real Plot Line of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: An Essay in Applied
Deconstruction’, Textual Practice 4
(1990): 390-427.
Week
9 Mourning,
Language and the Time of the Dead
·
William
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Vintage)
Recommended background reading: Freud, ‘Mourning
and Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin
Freud Library, vol. 11, ed. Angela Richards (1991).
Week
10 Film and Time 1: cyclic and redeemed time
·
W. B.
Yeats, Purgatory (play, h/o); Groundhog Day (Dir. Harold Ramis):
Recommended background reading: Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1975)
Week
11 Film and Time 2: writing, identity, and the continuous present
·
Memento (Dir. Christopher Nolan)
Copies of the DVD can be borrowed
from the Dept. Office. Recommended
background reading: selections from Mark
Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life
in America’s Wound Culture (1998), h/o
Secondary
Michael Adas,
Machines as the Measure of Men (1989)
Tim Armstrong, Modernism
(2005), chs. 1, 5.
Tim Armstrong, Modernism,
Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (1998)
Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)
Mikhail Bakhtin,
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans Caryl Emerson (1981)
Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of
Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (1993)
Walter Benjamin, ‘The
Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt,
trans. H. Zohn (1973)
Marshall Berman, All that is
Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(1983)
Marta Braun, Picturing Time:
The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1992)
F. Burwick
& P. Douglas, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson
and the Vitalist Controversy (1992)
Jonathan Crary,
Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture
(1999)
Sara Danius,
The Senses of Modernism: Technology,
Perception and Aesthetics (2002)
Mary Ann Doane,
‘Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and
the Cinema’, Critical Inquiry 22
(1996).
Johannes Fabian, Time
and the Other (1983)
Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology:
The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, vol.
11, ed. Angela Richards (1991).
Paul Fussell,
The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
Gerard Genette,
Narrative Discourse (1980)
Mary-Ann Gillies,
Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996)
Sara Haslam,
Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford and the
Great war (2002)
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1975)
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983)
Friedrich A Kittler, Discourse
Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (1990)
James Knapp, Literary
Modernism and the Transformation of Work (1988)
Shiv Kumar, Bergson
and the Stream-of-Consciousness Novel (1962)
Peter Leese,
Shell Shock (2002)
Wyndham Lewis, Time and
Western Man (1927)
Donald
M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (1982)
A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel (1965)
Julian Murphet
and
Michael O’Malley, Keeping
Watch: A History of American Time (1990)
Roger Poole, ‘The Real Plot Line of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good
Soldier: An Essay in Applied Deconstruction’, Textual Practice 4 (1990): 390-427.
Anson Rabinbach,
The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the
Origins of Modernity (1990)
Paul Ricoeur,
Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (1985) [see esp. vol. 2]
Michel Serres,
and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science,
Culture and Time, trans. R. Lapidus (1995)
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The
Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth
Century (1986)
Ronald
Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of
Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930 (2001)
Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers:
Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (1998)
Erwin R. Steinberg, ed., The Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the
Modern Novel (1979)
Allegra Stewart, Gertrude Stein and the Present (1967)
Pamela Thurschwell,
Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (2001)
E. P. Thompson, ‘Time,
Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (Dec.
1967): 56-97.
Michael Tratner, Deficits and Desires: Economics and
Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature (2001)
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory,
Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995)
W. Norton Wise, ‘Time Discovered and Time
Gendered in Victorian Science and Culture’, in Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds., From Energy to Information:
Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (2002),
39-58.
Virginia Woolf,
‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader I
(1984)
Web resources:
There are extets of many of the stories used
available on the web (Kipling; James); and full texts of many of the other
texts we read excerpts of (for example William James’s Principles of
Psychology: there are copies in the library, but if they are unavailable
you can also get it at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/). You will find visual material relating to Muybridge and Marey, useful film
sites etc.
Non-Assessed
Essay Questions
Write an essay of no more than 2,500
words on one of the following topics (or negotiate a separate topic with
me). The essay is due I the date
specified in the published assessment schedule.
1. Discuss any modernist text in which ‘tele-time’, or time conveyed over a distance, is an issue.
2. Discuss one of the following in Bergson’s work, relating it to literary examples:
‘cinematographic’ time; the time of memory; embodiment.
3. How does the notion of a continuous present
conflict with commonly-held accounts of identity?
4. Illustrate the common distinction between
‘story’ and ‘narrative’ in any modernist text, and discuss the extent to which
they can be separated.
5. How do notions of haunting inform any
text(s) you have studied?
6. How does time work in texts that deal with
any of the following: trauma; mourning; comedy; tragedy?
7. ‘Modernism sees a radical break between an
increasingly regularized ‘public’ time and understandings of how individuals
actually experience its flows’. Discuss.
8. How do notions of different individuals or
groups (social strata; peoples) having a ‘different’ time work in texts you
have studied?