UCL Comparative Literature

Comparative Literature

• Home
• Prospective Students
• Current Students
• People
• Student Resources
• Student Experience
• Contact Us

Quick Links

• Centre for Intercultural Studies
• Film Studies
• Gender Society and Representation
• Translation Theory and Practice

To be absolutely modern

Course code: CLITG007

Credits: 30

This course engages with experiences of modernism represented in European literature. The course title is taken from the poetic and ironic injunction of Rimbaud to be ‘absolutely modern’, which is further engaged with by Milan Kundera. Kundera and Rimbaud together explore the need to live in the present, in the sense of the Nietzschean injunction to re-arrange the past, and to dictate to history rather than be subjected to it. But these writers think ironically, and explore the inter-relation of asserting the present and being limited by it. For Kundera, ‘to be absolutely modern’ is ‘to collaborate with one’s own gravediggers’, in other words to bury the right to self-affirmation in the guise of dismissing the power of history. Kundera explores this problematic ‘collaboration’ in a range of novelistic and narrative procedures associated with postmodernism, but which are designed to assert the uniqueness of novel-writing in general, an dthroughout its hisotry, as a mode of cultural and moral critique. For his part, Michel Houellebecq in both novels and poetry explores the critical blindness and emotional numbness with regard to history nurtured by globalised markets. He integrates critical exposure of consumerist ideology with a critical exposure of emotional despair; and controversially delves into the lures of sex tourism and cloning to suggest that such are the routes to an emotional life offered by the hyper-markets. Set in the Turkish city of Kars, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow explores the relation of art and life and examines the nature in contemporary life of intercultural understanding, and tension; and the relations between state, exile, religion, and identity. Post-modernism champions the right to tell its own stories, but stands accused of losing the sense of self needed to tell at all. Each of these writers affirms the value of literary form in giving voice to a sense of emotional, intellectual and cultural self, as well as to the generation of ideas.

Tutor: Prof Tim Mathews

Texts for primary reading

• Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, translated from the French by Mark Treharne, 1998
• Milan Kundera, Immortality, translated from the Czech by Peter Kussi, 1992
• Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, translated from the French by Gavin Bowd, 2005
• Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Struggle, translated from the French by Delphine Grass and Timothy Mathews, 2010
• Orhan Pamuk, Snow, translated by from the Turkish Maureen Freely (London, Faber 2004)
• Milan Kundera, The art of the Novel, translated by Linda Asher, 1988
• Milan Kundera, The curtain : an essay in seven parts, translated from the French by Linda Asher, 2007

Prelimary critical reading

• Victoria Best and Martin Crowley, The New Pornographies : explicit sex in recent French fiction and film, 2007
• Harold Bloom, ed, Milan Kundera, 2003
• Antoine Compagnon, The Five Paradxoes of Modernity, 1990
• Ruth Cruickshank, Fin de millénaire French fiction : the aesthetics of crisis, 2009.
• Thomas Docherty After theory : postmodernism/postmarxism, 1990
• Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 1996
• Hal Foster, ed, The Anti-aesthetic : essays on postmodern culture, 1983
• Hal Foster et al, Art since 1900 : modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism, 2004
• John McCann, Michel Houellebecq : author of our times, 2010
• Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, 1996