Postgraduate Course: Literature and Modernity I: Modernist Aesthetics (ENLI11181)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Modernist Aesthetics is the semester 1 core course for the MSc Literature and Modernity and is restricted to students on that programme. The course explores key texts and topics in modernist literature of the first half of the twentieth century, alongside cultural, historical and intellectual contexts, and a range of critical and theoretical approaches. |
| Course description |
Modernist Aesthetics explores some of the landmarks of literary modernism of the first half of the twentieth century, with an emphasis placed on the close reading of literary writings in relation to cultural and historical contexts - such as empire, war, totalitarianism - and alongside critical engagement with intellectual historical contexts, such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism.
Indicative seminar schedule for 2018-19
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Modernism and the City
¿ Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; ed. David Bradshaw, Oxford UP, 2008).
¿ Rachel Bowlby, ¿Walking, Women, Writing¿ (1992)
Week 3: Modernism and Empire
¿ E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; ed. Oliver Stallybrass, Penguin, 2005).
¿ Sara Suleri, ¿Forster¿s Imperial Erotic¿, Ch. 6 in The Rhetoric of English India (1992)
Week 4: Gender and Geography
¿ Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (ed. Vincent O¿ Sullivan, Norton Critical Editions, 2005); in particular: ¿The Little Governess¿ (1915), ¿Prelude¿ (1917), ¿The Daughters of the Late Colonel¿ (1920), ¿The Garden Party¿ (1921)).
¿ Frank O¿Connor, ¿An Author in Search of a Subject¿ (1963) and Dominic Head, ¿Katherine Mansfield: The Impersonal Short Story¿, The Modernist Short Story (1992).
Week 5: The Figure of the Artist
¿ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; ed. John Paul Riquelme, Norton, 2007).
¿ John Paul Riquelme, ¿Dedalus and Joyce Writing the Book of Themselves¿ (1983).
Week 6: READING WEEK
Week 7: Modernism and War
¿ T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922; in The Complete Poems and Plays, Faber and Faber, 2011).
¿ Elizabeth Outka, ¿¿Wood for the Coffins Ran Out¿: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic¿ (2015)
Week 8: Queer Modernism
¿ Willa Cather, The Professor¿s House (Virago, 2006)
¿ Madoka Kishi, ¿¿More than anything else, I like my closets¿: Willa Cather¿s Melancholic Erotics in The Professor¿s House¿ (2013)
Week 9: African American Modernism
¿ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; Virago, 2018)
¿ Leif Sorenson, ¿Modernity on a Global Stage: Hurston¿s Alternative Modernism¿ (2005)
Week 10: The Ends of Modernism
¿ Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (1939)
¿ Judith Kegan Gardiner, ¿Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism¿ (1983)
Week 11: Revision and Essay Development Week
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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 2022/23, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: None |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
196 )
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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 |
Postgraduate students submit a 1,000-word essay outline in the second half of the course (usually Week 10 or 11), and receive formative written feedback within 10 working days. Written feedback and provisional marks (double-marked in the Department, subject to external moderation) are returned within 15 working days.
Students are also welcome to visit the tutor in office hours or by appointment to discuss their work and receive oral feedback on the outline and/or assessment.
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| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Read and critically engage with complex literary, critical, and theoretical texts.
- Acquire a critical vocabulary for the analysis of literary texts.
- Develop a broad understanding of the main movements and schools in modernist literature and thought along with some knowledge of pre-twentieth-century literary and critical movements.
- Read further and more widely in literary and cultural theory, having gained the requisite background knowledge and critical vocabulary.
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Reading List
| Talis Aspire Resource List |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | LaM1,literature,modernity,modernism,aesthetics |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Benjamin Bateman
Tel: (0131) 650 4288
Email: benjamin.bateman@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Kara McCormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: Kara.McCormack@ed.ac.uk |
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