Undergraduate Course: Modernism, Myth, and Romance 1880-1940 (ENLI10371)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course addresses modernism's investment in traditional narrative forms of myth, romance, and folk tales, and the systems of thought that they embodied. |
| Course description |
Although the archetypal modernist statement was Ezra Pound's 'make it new,' much avant garde writing of the period looked to the past to understand the present. This re-evaluation of the archaic, and its tropes of ordeal, rebirth, and renewal, provided inspiration for writers wrestling with the challenges of modernity: alienation, technological acceleration, and the aftermath of the Great War; as well as de-colonial movements, the reimagining of
gender roles, and the legacies of slavery. From the Celtic explorations of early W.B. Yeats to James Joyce's Homeric parallels, and from the Harlem Renaissance's adaptations of blues and jazz (rooted in West African cultural forms) to Virginia Woolf's recourse to English folk culture in the shadow of WWII, modernist writers' radical experiments in literary representation drew on the resources of the past. This course will therefore examine 'myth' and 'romance', not as a source of timeless archetypes representing an ahistorical human nature, but as a strategic resource on which writers draw in grappling with the disruptions and dislocations of modernity.
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
2000 word coursework essay (30%) submitted mid-semester;
plus 3000 word final essay submitted during exam period (70%). |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- demonstrate competency in core skills in the study of English Literature: essay-writing, independent reading, group discussion, small-group autonomous learning
- provide informed analysis of Modernist prose and poetry, in writing and in discussion.
- demonstrate knowledge of the uses of myth, romance, and folk forms and sources in Anglophone texts over a 60 year period.
- demonstrate the ability to reflect critically on a variety of critical and methodological approaches to Modernist poetry and prose.
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Reading List
Syllabus:
An anthology of modernist manifestos and other sources
W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (1889-1939)
R.L. Stevenson, ¿The Beach of Falesá¿ (1892); extracts from In the South Seas (1896)
H.D., Selected Poems (1914-1935)
James Joyce, chapters from Ulysses (1922)
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
Scottish Renaissance (Hugh MacDiarmid, extract from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926); Nan Shepherd, poems from In the Cairngorms (1934))
Harlem Renaissance (selected folktales, poems, and prose works by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (1921 - 1942))
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941)
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Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr David Farrier
Tel: (0131 6)50 3607
Email: David.Farrier@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Lina Gordyshevskaya
Tel:
Email: pgordysh@ed.ac.uk |
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