MODERNISM, MODERNITY and HISTORY
(Core course, EN 5301A)
Tutor Tim Armstrong t.armstrong@rhul.ac.uk
The aim of this course is to introduce students to recent
thinking on Modernism (or Modernisms, as Peter Nicholls puts it), and to a
range of issues within the study of modernism, in particular its historical
location and the relationship between literary modernism and social modernity.
There will also be some attempt to relate the texts studied to developments in
the visual arts, music, and cinema. The
choice of texts is designed to reflect the topics covered, and the reading is
often theoretical (a series of short extracts from the course reader) rather
than literary: this is not a survey.
Each term is divided into two parts. The first term
includes an examination of some of the foundational modernist movements and
manifestoes; and an examination of some of the ways in which Modernism and
modernity were theorized in the period 1900-1945, with attention to such issues
as modernity and mass culture, modernity and technology, and modernity and the body.
The second term looks at modernism, primitivism and sexuality, and at modernism
and the political sphere.
Teaching and Assessment
Teaching is by weekly-two hour seminar, in which there
will normally be a student paper. The course is assessed by a term papers
totaling 7-9,000 words, to be handed in at the beginning of term 3. Advice will be offered on choice of topics
during the teaching term, and advice will also be given on drafts of the essay
over the Easter vacation. For further
details about assessment criteria and regulations, consult the Programme
Document for the MA.
Required reading. The reading for each week’s seminar, which
may comprise a novel, essay, poetry or other kinds of writing, is detailed in
the Course Description below.
Additional
Feedback
If there are any
issues you need to discuss during the course, please see Tim Armstrong, Room
203 or your assigned academic advisor.
At the end of the course, the usual anonymous questionnaire will be
distributed to collect your feedback on the course. Issues can also be raised
via the MA’s representative on the Postgraduate Staff-Student Committee.
In this booklet you will find:
·
a week-by-week Course Description.
·
a list of topics which you might consider each week.
·
links to a list of Secondary Sources, both general and specific
to each week. In writing essays, you are encouraged to find other materials as
well, and especially to use the resources of the Senate House (
PLEASE NOTE
The structure of the course can change
slightly from year to year, according to staffing, so this document is an
indication of what will be taught rather than a definitive list of topics and
texts. A full course document is issued
at the beginning of the year.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The set text is Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni,
Further Reading relating to each topic is given in the list of Secondary Sources
(p.7).
TERM 1
Part I :
Modernism and the Avant Garde
Week 1 Introduction: short Lecture and discussion of some points
of origin in Modernism
Topics
·
modernity and modernism
·
skepticism
·
abstraction and subjectivism
·
individalism vs. the crowd
·
commodification
·
modernity and urban life
Week
2 Futurism and Dada
(manifestos, art, writings)
Topics
·
Anti-art and the radicalism of Dada
·
the machine age and the attack on the
past
·
Futurism’s aesthetics: speed,
connection
·
Futurism and war
·
Futurism and gender
Week 3 English
movements: Egoism, Imagism and Vorticism
(manifestos, writings)
Topics
·
the role of the literary magazine
·
Pound’s debt to Futurism
·
the Imagist programme and its
application
·
Vorticism and scientific language
·
the legacy of Vorticism in the Cantos
Week 4 The Men of 1914 and the
occasion of The Waste Land
Context: Eliot’s letters; Norbert Elias, ‘The Kitsch Style and
the Age of Kitsch’ (1935); Lawrence Rainey, Institutions
of Modernism; Wayne Koestlenbaum, Double
Talk (these texts will be distributed among class members)
Topics
·
the making and selling on The Waste Land
·
modernist obscurity and the audience
·
the modernist fragment
·
the psychosexual matrix of the poem
·
social anxieties in the poem
Week 5 Surrealism
(manifestos, art, writings)
Literary Example:
Nathanael West’s short novella The
Dream Life of Balso Snell.
Topics
·
Surrealism and the unconscious
·
automatic writing and other techniques
·
the image vs. writing
·
gender and desire
·
politics: how radical is Surrealism?
·
Surrealism and the everyday
·
Surrealism and death (Nicholls)
Part II :
Modernity, mass culture and technology
Week 6 Urban
Experience: Neurasthenia, Shock and Distraction in Modern Life
Topics
·
electrical conceptions of the nerves
·
processing sense impressions
·
the flaneur and the city
·
distracted aesthetics
Week 7 The Great War as Mass Trauma
Topics
·
war and modernity
·
shell-shock, wounding and trauma
·
gender and the war
·
war and madness
Week 8 Bergsonism: Time,
Subjectivism and the Body
Reading from MAS (there is quite a lot to get through
for this unit – apologies):
Bergson (68), Delaunay
(194), Marsden (331), William Carlos Williams (344), Sinclair (351), Pound
(379), H.D. (382), Woolf (391-5),
Literary examples: Lawrence, Women in
Love (chapters to be specified); poems by Williams and Mina Loy (h/o); the
‘Time Passes’ section of Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse.
Topics
·
the body and its energies
·
sex and vitalism: art as discharge?
·
vitalism and primitivism
·
Human vs. machine time (the
cinematographic)
·
the structure of the moment
·
Objectivism and impersonality
·
the marionette and the rejection of
the body
Week 9 Modernism and
the Mass Culture Industry
Literary example: Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts; ‘Some
Notes on Miss L’ (
Topics
·
Simmel and the city as alienated
identity
·
Adorno’s critique of mass culture
·
Kracauer and the pleasures of the Mass
Ornament
·
West: the writer and the gendering of
mass audiences
Week 10 Modernism and Film
Literary Example:
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
Topics
·
films as a new language
·
montage and other experimental
techniques
·
Benjamin on film
·
silent film vs. sound
·
West’s critique of Hollwood: hysteria, pornography, and the failure of
literature
TERM 2
Part III :
Primitivism, race, gender, and sexuality in modernism
Week 1 Modernism and Primitivism: the call of the wild
Literary
example: Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925)
Topics
·
Primitivism and abstraction
·
the wisdom of the ancients
·
Modernism and Occultism
·
Civilization and its discontents
Week 2 Dreamscapes and the Unconscious
Literary example: Joyce, Ulysses,
‘Nighttown’ section.
Topics
·
Joyce and racial thinking
·
gender and perversion
·
obscenity
·
dream-logic
Week 3 Racial identity in the
Topics
·
debates on the politics of culture
·
high and low in black art
·
passing both ways
·
sexual ‘passing’
Week 4 Women, Modernity, Language
Literary texts: Virginia
Woolf, Three Guineas; Christina
Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
(1940), ch. 9 parts 2-3 (h/o).
Topics
·
the attack on tradition
·
feminism and franchise
·
women and space
·
women and culture
·
man-made language
Week 5 Sexual Outsiders
Topics
·
defining the ‘invert’
·
the carnivalesque body
·
Perversion: cross-dressing,
masturbation, S/M etc.
·
racial outsiders
·
sexuality, gender, and mourning
Part IV: The Politics of Modernism
Week 6 The Politics of Modernism: An Introduction
Reading
Topics
·
The experience of modernity
·
Democracy and the market
·
Modernity and revolution
·
Modernity and cultural theory
Week 7 Political Debate between the Wars
Reading in MASD: Radical aesthetics – Meyerhold (240), Gan
(298), Moholy-Nagy (299), Mexican
Workers (304), LEF (305) – vs. Zhdanov on Socialist Realism, 1934 (524) and
Lukács either side of that divide (229, 584); Hitler (560); Read (526), Gill
(530), Stead (536), Dos Passos (548), Cornford (548), Jameson (556), Siquerios
(595), Breton et al (597).
·
politics and the avante garde
·
socialist realism
·
propaganda and commitment
·
Fascism and anti-Fascism
Week 8 Lost Political Traditions in the Period
of Modernism
American political writing of the twenties and thirties (h/o –
Muriel Rukeyser and others); material from Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Recovery of
Cultural Memory (h/o).
·
radicalism and its aesthetics
·
the document
·
the politics of the radical ‘occasion’
(eg. Sacco & Vanzetti, Scotsboro)
·
the processes of cultural memory
Week 9 Modernism and Empire
Literary Examples: Yeats, Joyce, Conrad, Woolf.
·
Modernism and Englishness
·
Modernism, colonialism and nationalism
·
Empire and Decadence
·
Modernism, myth and monopoly
capitalism
Week 10 The End of Modernism: Modernism and the
Postmodern
·
modernism’s after-courses
·
differentiating modernism and
postmodernism
·
postmodernism’s modernism