SE2463: Modernism and the City

School English Literature
Department Code ENCAP
Module Code SE2463
External Subject Code 100319
Number of Credits 20
Level L6
Language of Delivery English
Module Leader Dr Joshua Robinson
Semester Autumn Semester
Academic Year 2013/4

Outline Description of Module

On this module we will trace the representation of the city in a variety of modernist texts, including poetry, novels, short stories, films, visual art, and theoretical writing, paying particular attention to the historical and cultural context of these texts.

 

The rise of urban life had a huge effect on the literary and artistic movement of the first half of the twentieth century known as modernism, and on the construction of the twentieth-century subject. Indeed, modernity itself can be identified as having grown in concert with the dominance of the metropolis. The mixture of fascination and revulsion with which modernist writers inhabited their cities is key to the texts we will look at on this course. We will identify this paradoxical sense of the city as a site of possibility, of chance collision and erotic encounter, but also as imbued with the fragmentary and alienating effects of urbanism – the city can be, as it was for James Joyce, ‘the centre of paralysis’. This module will investigate a wide range of modernist responses to the city: literary, artistic, theoretical, and cinematic.

 

On completion of the module a student should be able to

On completion of the module students will be able to demonstrate an ability to read a range of modernist texts critically and analytically, drawing associations between the text – be it artistic, literary or cinematic – and the theoretical, historical and cultural context in which it was produced. They will have deepened and developed their thinking about the significance of the city in the twentieth century, and will be able to draw on a sophisticated range of critical material in order to make new and exciting conceptualisations of the period.

How the module will be delivered

One one-hour lecture weekly, and one two-hour seminar. During the lecture students will be given handouts, and powerpoint presentations will be used where appropriate (for instance when discussing visual art). These will be made available to students on Learning Central directly after the session. During the seminar students will occasionally be asked to give presentations, and each week there will be the opportunity for small-group discussion and close-analysis. There will be film screenings arranged where necessary. Other forms of multimedia, including audio, will not be used.

 

Skills that will be practised and developed

This module will develop a wide range of skills, as students develop and enhance their ability to assimilate a variety of critical approaches to a range of literary and cultural texts. The close analysis of texts will call for sensitivity to the use of language, as well as visual and historical awareness. Critical thinking, interdisciplinary skills, the successful integration of theoretical material into an analysis of a text, and the formulation of concise and effective argumentation will all be essential critical skills developed during this module.

 

How the module will be assessed

A single essay of 3,200 words. Questions will be provided but students will also be encouraged to develop their own. The module is assessed according to the Marking Criteria set out in the English Literature Course Guide. There are otherwise no academic or competence standards which limit the availability of adjustments or alternative assessments for students with disabilities.

 

Type of assessment

Title

Duration (exam) /

Word length (essay)

Approx. date of assessment

Essay

100

 

3,200 words

January

 

Assessment Breakdown

Type % Title Duration(hrs)
Written Assessment 100 Essay N/A

Syllabus content

Students will be expected to have read in advance the texts marked below as ‘essential reading’. The texts marked ‘further reading’ are optional, but recommended. A more general suggested bibliography will be provided at the beginning of the course. Wherever possible, and particularly for the critical readings and poetry, texts will be provided electronically on Learning Central (LC). Students are advised, however, to obtain their own copies of the novels and the short story collections. There are no preferred editions for this course, but preferred translations are marked. Students should contact the module leader as early as possible if they will require readings in an alternative format.

 

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: The Flâneur. Essential Reading: Charles Baudelaire, ‘To a Passer-by’; T.S. Eliot: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; ‘Preludes’; Walter Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs From Baudelaire’ (LC).Further Reading: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project; Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (LC); Henri Lefebvre, ‘Urban Form’;Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the dérive’.

Week 3:  Alienation in the City. Essential Reading: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans., Michael Hofmann*. Further Reading: Raymond Williams, The Country and the City.

Week 4: Modernist Aesthetics. Essential Reading/Viewing: Selected poems by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson (LC); Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (LC); Marcel Duchamp, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2’; Jacob Epstein, ‘Rock-Drill’. Further Reading: Gertrude Stein, ‘Pictures’; Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’ (LC).

Week 5: Joyce and the City. Essential Reading: James Joyce, Dubliners. Further Reading: James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Week 6: Reading Week

Week 7: Cinematic Modernity. Essential Viewing: Fritz Lang (dir.) Metropolis.Further Viewing: Charlie Chaplin (dir.) City Lights; Scott Klein, ‘Modernist Babylons: Utopian Aesthetics and Urban Spectacle’ (LC).

Week 8: Urban Manhattan. Essential Reading: Frank O’Hara ‘Second Avenue’; Walt Whitman, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’; Frank O'Hara, Jackson Pollock (New York, 1959). Essential viewing: Paintings by Jackson Pollock; ‘Jackson Pollock: The Process’, slides/clip on line at http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/process1.shtm. Further Viewing: Val Lewton (dir.) The Seventh Victim. Further Reading: John Ashbery, ‘On Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim’.

Week 9: Exile. Essential Reading: Selected poems by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and W.H. Auden (LC); Samuel Beckett, Murphy; translations of poems by Nelly Sachs, Osip Mandelstam, Paul Celan (LC).

Week 10: The Erotics of the Modern City. Essential Reading: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood; Selected poems from Walt Whitman, Mina Loy, and Frank O’Hara (LC).Further Reading: Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

Week 11: Conclusion: course summary and Q & A.

 

Essential Reading and Resource List

INDICATIVE READING LIST:

 

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand “Endgame”’ (1961)

Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998).

Tim Armstrong, Modernism (2005). [Great general introduction to the period.]

Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart, eds., Restless Cities (2010).

Michael J Begnal, Joyce and the City: the Significance of Place (2002).

Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1983).

David Bradshaw, ed. A Concise Companion to Modernism (2003)

Peter Brooker, ed. Modernism/Postmodernism (1992)

Malcolm Bradbury & James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: 1830-1930 (1976).

Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984).

Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-1914 (1994).

Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avante-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987)[Very good on the avante-garde.]

Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (1999).

Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (1991).

J. H. Dettmar & Stephen Watts, eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self-promotion, Canonization, Rereading (1996).

Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (1990).

Peter Faulkner, ed., A Modernist Reader (1986).

Briony Fer et al, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (1993).

Desmond Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (2003).

Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (1995). [Extremely helpful first section on modernist irony.]

Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (1970). [Particularly the fifth and sixth chapters, ‘Urban Myths and Ideologies’ and ‘Urban Form’.]

Richard Daniel Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (1998). [Excellent general introduction to the city in literature.]

David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (2003).

Luc Sante, Low Life (1991). [Very good cultural history of Manhattan]

Edward Timms, David Kelley, Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (1985).

Lawrence Rainey, ed., Modernism: An Anthology (2005). [Useful general compendium of sources.]

Iain Boyd Whyte, Modernism and the Spirit of the City (2003).[Good for an architectural and city-planning perspective.]

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973).


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