Undergraduate Course: Modernism's Moving Bodies: Text, Dance, Performance after 1890 (ENLI10439)
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 will examine the relationship between movement, dance, and embodiment in modernist literature. It will consider how the moving body became a focal point for modernist experiments in aesthetics, narrative, and genre, bringing together literary texts with case studies from dance, theatre, and film. It will begin by clarifying the complex relationship between 'movement,' 'modernism,' and 'modernity' by considering how fin-de-siècle writers responded to modern dance as an ideal art form in the 1890s, aligning literary and choreographic techniques in the early decades of modernism. It will then explore how modernists across different spheres mobilised bodily movement as a rich inter-medial language, allowing them to address the period's major discourses around corporeal wholeness and fragmentation; the 'natural' versus the 'mechanical'; racialised and 'primitivist' forms; the turn to antiquity; and the centrality of bodily gestures to sexual and gender expression. By foregrounding an art form often overlooked as feminine and ephemeral, this course will suggest new ways of thinking about literary modernism and its complex accommodation of the body-in-motion. |
| Course description |
'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' (W.B. Yeats, 'Among School Children'). How do we read moving bodies and what relationship do they bear to language? This course will consider these questions by examining the rich ways in which modernist literature conceptualised bodily movement during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the age of modernism, the links between literature and the performing arts were surprisingly profound and far-reaching. Dancers including Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, and Vaslav Nijinsky were seen as emblems of the modernist desire to 'make it new', while literary figures such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Emily Holmes Coleman incorporated the language and aesthetics of dance movement into their work. As changing understandings of the body permeated the cultural sphere, artists across different disciplines found fresh ways of imagining the body's expressive capacities, creating points of contact between major writers and lesser-known performers and choreographers.
On this course, we will consider how moving bodies shaped late nineteenth and twentieth-century writing, not merely as subjects of representation or ekphrasis but also as models for craft and technique. During this period, physical movement became a focal point for many of modernism's larger intellectual and aesthetic concerns, from philosophical debates about free will and the politics of gender, to the revival of Greek antiquity and notions of `primitivist` and `natural` rhythm. We will use the moving body as a locus for thinking through the complexities of modernist prose, drama, and poetics, supported by important contextual and theoretical texts in our reading each week. In some cases, recordings of performances will be made available; in other weeks, we will use different kinds of sources (photographs, art, reviews and interviews, memoirs, stage and costume designs) to build a picture of the moving body in relation to literary and performance cultures of this period. As well as discussing specific examples of dance, theatre, and film performance, we will think about how a broadly conceived language of movement; of moving bodies, things, and ideas; became a rich source of imaginative possibility for these writers and performers.
Indicative reading list for 2025/26
This list is indicative and subject to change.
Essential:
Stéphane Mallarmé, 'Another Study of Dance,' in Divagations (Harvard UP, 2007).
Oscar Wilde, 'Salomé,' in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics, 2008).
H.D., Collected Poems (New Directions, 1983).
Isadora Duncan, 'The Art of the Dance,' in Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen eds, What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (Oxford, 1983)
Futurism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Yale UP, 2009).
Mina Loy, Stories & Essays (Dalkey, 2011) and Lost Lunar Baedeker (Carcanet, 1997)
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford World's Classics, 2014).
Woolf Works DVD (The Royal Ballet, 2015)
Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (Vintage, 2001).
W. B. Yeats, Selected Plays (Penguin, 1997)
Richard Bruce Nugent, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections (Duke UP, 2002)
Emily Holmes Coleman, The Shutter of Snow (Faber & Faber, 2022)
Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (Faber & Faber, 2006)
Recommended:
Bradshaw, David, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach, eds. Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, Modernity. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Brandstetter, Gabriele. Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Franko, Mark. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Indiana UP, 1995.
Jones, Susan. Literature, Modernism and Dance. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Koritz, Amy. Gendering Bodies/ Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century Culture. University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Lepecki, André, ed. Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
Marcus, Laura. Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern. Oxford University Press, 2024.
McCarren, Felicia. Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine. Stanford University Press, 1998.
Preston, Carrie J. Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Verso, 2013).
Taxidou, Olga. Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2025/26, 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
(
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 %
|
| Additional Information (Assessment) |
30% Essay 1 (2000 words)
70% Essay 2 (3000 words) |
| Feedback |
Students will receive feedback on all written assignments, with the feedback on the mid-semester essay made available before submission of the final essay. Postgraduate students will be able to submit a 1-2 page plan and receive feedback in advance of submission of their coursework essay. Students at all levels will be encouraged to make use of the convenor`s office hours to discuss their feedback and any questions they have about their performance or the course as a whole. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of modernism across different genres, including manifestos, poetry, dance, drama, and the novel.
- Critically engage with interdisciplinary methods that combine literary criticism with concepts drawn from performance studies, dance studies, and theories of embodiment.
- Build arguments analysing and comparing a range of literary and non-literary sources.
- Evaluate in depth how writers and performers engaged with major ideas and themes of the period; for instance, gender, sexuality, race, nationalism, and technology.
- Conduct research individually and in small groups and critically report on how these findings illuminate the key concerns of the course.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
This course will promote the following graduate attributes:
Curiosity for learning that makes a positive difference
Passion to engage locally and globally
Creative problem solving and research
Critical and reflective thinking
Skilled communication
This course challenges students to engage with interdisciplinary methods that will enhance their curiosity about their subject area and encourage them to approach their research objectives with creativity. They will pair more familiar literary materials, novels, poems, plays with non-literary objects, including photographs, paintings, films, reviews and interviews, and stage and costume designs, allowing them to explore new inter-medial ways of thinking about modernism and the various forms it took across the arts. Through looking at the relationship between literary texts and performance sources, they will be asked to think critically and comparatively about the affordances of different modernist genres, reflecting on how questions of technique, aesthetics, authorship, tradition, and language apply across the course materials.
By taking `bodies` as its core focus, this course asks students to interrogate their assumptions about how different bodies create meaning, and how certain socio-cultural factors shape these bodily representations. The figures and sources covered on this course emerged from diverse national and transnational contexts. Themes relating to gender, race, age, and health continue to ramify in contemporary local and global contexts; students will therefore develop skills in communication that will continue to serve them well after they graduate, allowing them to discuss these issues with authority, sensitivity, and clarity. |
| Keywords | Modernism; bodies; dance; performance; gender |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Megan Girdwood
Tel:
Email: megan.girdwood@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Hope Hamilton
Tel: (0131 6)50 4167
Email: hope.hamilton@ed.ac.uk |
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