Postgraduate Course: Literature and Modernity I: Modernist Aesthetics (ENLI11181)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This is the core course for MSc Literature and Modernity and is restricted to students on that programme.
This course provides an overview of some of the key texts and topics in modernist literature and culture. Emphasis is placed on the close reading of literary writings in relation to historical contexts - such as empire, war, and totalitarianism - and alongside critical engagement with intellectual historical contexts influential for current understandings of culture, such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism. The course encourages students to focus in detail on one specific writer, text, or movement in their assessed coursework essay.
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| Course description |
Week 1: Introduction to Modernism
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) and The Waste Land (1922); a selection of extracts/poems by other poets (available on the course webpage on Learn).
Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) and Ulysses, Order and Myth (1923); extracts from James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890).
Week 2: Modernism and Empire
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899/1902).
Extracts from Henry James, The New Novel (1914), E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad: A Note¿ (1921), Ford Madox Ford, A Personal Remembrance (1924), and Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad (1925); Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Heart of Darkness (1977) (all collected in the Norton Critical Edition).
Week 3: Modernism and the Short Story
Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories.
Extracts from Conrad Aiken, The Short Story as Colour (1922), Virginia Woolf, A Terribly Sensitive Mind (1927), Frank O¿Connor, An Author in Search of a Subject (1963), Elizabeth Bowen, A Living Writer (1956) (all collected in the Norton Critical Edition); Dominic Head, Katherine Mansfield: The Impersonal Short Story, The Modernist Short Story (1992).
Week 4: Modernism, Consciousness and Sexuality
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920); extracts from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) (available on Learn).
Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1909).
Week 5: Modernism and War
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918), Selected Poetry of the First World War, and extracts from Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929).
Paul Fussell, A Satire of Circumstance, The Great War and Modern Memory (1979).
Week 6: Modernism, Time, Memory, and History
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925), ¿Modern Fiction (1921), ¿Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923).
Extracts from Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927); extract from Henri Bergson, The Multiplicity of Conscious States; the Idea of Duration, Time and Free Will (1889/1910); extract from William James, The Stream of Thought, The Principles of Psychology (1890).
Week 7: Modernism and Everything
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).
Georg Lukács, The Ideology of Modernism (1957).
Week 8: Modernism and the American Dream
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925).
Extract from Walter Lipmann, Drift and Mastery (1919), H.L. Mencken, Totentanz, Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924), and Lionel Trilling, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Liberal Imagination (1950).
Week 9: Modernism and Totalitarianism
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925), Letter to His Father (1952).
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, from The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80); Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka on the Tenth Anniversary of His Death¿ (1934) and Max Brods Book on Kafka and Some of My Own Reflections (1938).
Week 10: Modernism and its Legacies
Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (1951-1958).
George Bataille, Review article, Molloy (1951), Maurice Blanchot, Review article, The Unnameable (1958); Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (1967).
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2015/16, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: None |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
One essay of 4,000 words (100%) |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
| Students should develop the capacity to read and criticise complex theoretical texts and arguments. They should also acquire a critical vocabulary for the analysis of literary texts. In addition, students should also possess a broad understanding of the main movements and schools in modern thought along with some knowledge of the relevance of pre-twentieth-century critical movements for contemporary theory. After completion of the course students should be able to read further and more widely in literary and cultural theory, having gained the requisite background knowledge and critical vocabulary.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | LaM1 |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Simon Cooke
Tel: (0131 6)51 3996
Email: Simon.Cooke@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Kara Mccormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: Kara.McCormack@ed.ac.uk |
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© Copyright 2015 The University of Edinburgh - 18 January 2016 4:03 am
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