SELCS

Theorising Modernity, Practising Modernism


Course code: ELCS6034
Tutor: James Agar
Level: intermediate
Mode of Assessment: 1 assessed essay of 2000 words and 1.5 hour desk examination
Term: taught in term 2

Course description:
This course focuses on debates and issues arising from the critical terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ which, although contestable, relate broadly to early to mid 20th century European cultural movements and their literary manifestation. The course aims to foster a critical debate between political and theoretical texts written about and within modernity and how they may help us respond to and engage with literary representations from a similar time period (and vice versa). The course will examine literary texts from and across different genres and from a range of European cultures and will also foster a critical rapprochement between theory, literature and history. The course will include extensive small group discussion work and individual student presentations.

Primary Texts:

  • Baudelaire, selected poems (1857), provided in photocopy or pdf via moodle [Les fleurs du mal, Les petits poèmes en prose]
  • Flaubert, Sentimental Education (novel, any edition) [L’Education sentimentale (1869, folio)]
  • Benjamin, Illuminations (Pimlico) [Schriften (1955)]
  • Freud, Two Short Accounts of Psychoanalysis (Penguin) [Uber Psychoanalyse (1910); Die Frage der Laienanalyse (1926)]
  • Saussure, photocopied excerpts from the Course in General Linguistics [Cours de linguistique générale (1916)]
  • Breton, Nadja (Penguin) [Nadja (1928, folio)]
  • Selection of surrealist poetry by Eluard, Breton, Lorca, Hinojosa; provided in photocopy or pdf via moodle.
  • Selection of modernist poetry by Yeats, Eliot, Cavafy; provided in photocopy or pdf via moodle.
  • Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) (Penguin)

Initial Secondary Bibliography:

  • Martin Travers, An Introduction to Modern European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism (1998)
  • Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995)
  • Peter Childs, Modernism (2007)
  • Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity (1982)
  • Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, eds. Kolocotroni, Goldman and Taxidou (1998)