ENGL30414: Modernism and Modernity from LTSU on Vimeo.
Year: Final
Part of the year: Full Year
Module Leader: Andrew Thacker
Assessments:
Description:
This module is in two parts. The first part of the module explores where the art and literature of modernism was first published; that is, in the pages of the modernist ‘little magazines’. In the second part, students examine three keys texts of Anglo-American modernism: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
This module aims to explore some of the central features of the many transnational movements of modernism, examining how the experimental qualities of modernist culture were conditioned by responses to changes in social and technological modernity. The module will thus explore the main characteristics of modernism across a range of literary texts, while also situating this work in a wider interdisciplinary context of experimentation in the arts and culture of modernism (e.g. visual art, architecture, cinema). Students will examine modernist literature against the original contexts of publication, and an innovative feature of the module is the focus upon the modernist ‘little magazine’ (which will be studied in digital form, thus introducing students to some of the ideas of Digital Humanities).
Prerequisites: N/A
Useful Information:
modernist studies; magazines and periodicals; 1890s to 1920s
Set texts:
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land – NB: any good edition with Eliot’s notes will suffice (e.g. included in The Norton Anthology of Poetry)
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Jerri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Teaching methods/structure:
Lectures; research-led seminars; online activities; independent reading and further research.
Please view the module specification for the learning outcomes for this module.
Contact details for further queries (module leader):
Chris Mourant: chris.mourant@ntu.ac.uk
office hours in MAE309;
https://chrismourant.youcanbook.me/