ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
MA IN MODERNISM AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
2014-15
Modernism, Modernity
and History
EN 5331
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Modernism, Modernity and History
EN 5331
Tutor: Tim Armstrong
[email protected]
The aim of this course is to introduce students to recent thinking on Modernism (or Modernisms, as
Peter Nicholls puts it), and to a range of issues within the study of modernism, in particular its
historical location and the relationship between literary modernism and social modernity. There will
also be some attempt to relate the texts studied to developments in the visual arts, music, and
cinema. The choice of texts is designed to reflect the topics covered, and the reading is often
contextual (a series of short extracts from the course reader) rather than literary: this is not a survey.
The term is divided into two parts. The first part includes an examination of some of the
foundational modernist movements, manifestoes, and crucial moments; the second looks at more
general issues relating to modernism’s cultural and historical context.
Teaching and Assessment
Teaching is by weekly-two hour seminar. Students will be asked to prepare for seminars by setting
up reading groups which meet for an hour before the seminar to prepare the main literary example.
The course is assessed by one term paper: see Departmental Taught MA Handbook for reguulations
and word limits. Where (as will usually be the case) the course is taught in term 1, drafts of the
essay must be handed in by the first day of term 2 in order to receive feedback; final versions are to
be handed in early in term 3. Advice will be offered on choice of topics. For further details about
assessment criteria and regulations, consult the Programme Document for the MA.
Required reading. The reading for each week’s seminar, which may comprise a novel, essay, poetry
or other kinds of writing, is detailed in the Course Description below.
Additional Reading. Suggestions for additional reading are detailed below. Although the first task
is always the primary reading, secondary material will be needed for all presentations and essays.
Feedback
If there are any issues you need to discuss during the course, please see Tim Armstrong, Room 203
or your assigned academic advisor. At the end of the course, the usual anonymous questionnaire
will be distributed to collect your feedback on the course. Issues can also be raised via the MA’s
representative on the Postgraduate Staff-Student Committee.
In this booklet you will find:
a week-by-week Course Description.
a list of topics which you might consider each week.
a list of Secondary Souces both general and specific to each week.
The set text is Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane
Goldman and Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh University Press, 1998), referred to below as MAS with page
numbers of the beginning of excerpts. You should also buy Nathanael West’s Collected Works, since
three of his novellas are used as points of discussion in term 1. Recommended secondary texts
include Peter Nicholls’s Modernisms and Tim Armstrong’s Modernism: A Cultural History.
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COURSE DESCRIPTION
Week 2: Introduction: lecture; points of origin in Modernism
Reading from MAS : Marx (5), Nietzsche (17), LeBon (36), Veblen (38), Worringer (72), Baudelaire
(102), Pater (112), Mallarmé (123), Shklovsky (217).
Literary examples: poems by Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Loy, Pound
Topics
modernity and modernism
skepticism
abstraction and subjectivism
individualism vs. the crowd
commodification
modernity and urban life
Week 3:
Literary Avant-gardes: Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism
Reading from MAS: Loos (77), Huelsenbeck (207), Jarry (129), Marinetti (249), Zdanevich & Larionov
(257), Loy (258), Tzara (276), Schwitters (281), Grotz (287), and Gramsci on Marinetti (214); with
additional handout. T. E. Hulme (178), Lewis (200), Imagism (268), Vorticism (291), Pound (373) with
additional handout of examples including Imagist poems, material from The Egoist, and a short
extract from the Cantos. Blast can be read in its entirety at http://www.modjourn.org.
Topics
Anti-art and the radicalism of Dada
the machine age and the attack on the past
Futurism’s aesthetics: speed, connection
Futurism and war
Futurism and gender
the role of the literary magazine
Pound’s debt to Futurism
the Imagist programme and its application
Vorticism and scientific language
the legacy of Vorticism in the Cantos
Week 4: The Great War as Mass Trauma
Reading from MAS: Apollinaire (211); ‘A member of the Audience: Storming the Winter Palace’
(223), Stein ‘Composition as Explanation’ (421); Freud on the War (h/o).
Literary texts: accounts and poems of the Somme (h/o); short stories by Mary Butt, Wyndham
Lewis, D. H. Lawrence (h/o); Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier .
Topics
war and modernity
shell-shock, wounding and trauma
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gender and the war
war and madness
mourning
Week 5: Establishing High Modernism: The Men of 1914 and the occasion
of The Waste Land
Context: Norbert Elias, ‘The Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch’ (1935); Lawrence Rainey, Institutions
of Modernism; Wayne Koestlenbaum, Double Talk; Eliot’s letters; Eliot essays (MAS 366); the first
issue of the Criterion (handouts of these texts will be distributed via Moodle).
Literary example: The Waste Land and drafts
Topics
the making and selling on The Waste Land
modernist obscurity and the audience
the modernist fragment
the psychosexual matrix of the poem
social anxieties in the poem
Week 6:
Surrealism and Late Modernism (manifestos, art, writings)
Reading in MAS: Freud (47), Surrealist Manifestos (307, 597), transition (312) and Jolas (312),
Bruñel (238), Benjamin on Surrealism (563); handout of more material.
Literary Example: English surrealist poetry and writings (on Moodle)
Topics
Surrealism and the unconscious
automatic writing and other techniques
the image vs. writing
gender and desire
the carnivalesque body
Surrealism and the everyday
Surrealism and death (Nicholls)
politics: how radical is Surrealism?
Black humour
= READING WEEK =
Week 8:
Vital Streams: Shock, Distraction and the Embodied Subject
Reading from MAS: George M. Beard (handout); Baudelaire again (102), Simmel (51), Bergson (68),
Ford (323); Williams (344); Stevens (518); Benjamin on Baudelaire (h/o); Sinclair (351), Pound (379),
H.D. (382), Woolf (391-5), Lawrence (405).
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You might compare on the other side of the argument (and in particular on the armored self and the
marionette-theatre): Jarry (129) Craig (150), Yeats (337), Eliot again (367); Artaud (470); and
Wyndham Lewis, ‘Skin and Intestines’ (from The Art of Being Ruled, short h/o).
Literary texts: Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’ (h/o) and Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage 1
(Pointed Roofs), chs. 1-3 (h/o).
Topics
electrical conceptions of the nerves
processing sense impressions / literary impressionism
the flaneur and the city
distracted aesthetics and automaticity
Objectivism and impersonality
the marionette and the rejection of the body
the body and its energies
sex and vitalism: art as discharge?
vitalism and primitivism
Human vs. machine time (the cinematographic)
the structure of the moment
debates on time
Week 9: Mass Culture
Reading in MAS: Simmel again (51); Kracauer (457), Adorno (577), Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (570). The Benjamin extracts are a little unsatisfactory: the full
text of his essay can be found in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; or can be downloaded from
the web (the address tends to move about, so try Google). We will also read Siegfried Kracauer’s
1927 essay ‘The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies ’ (h/o).
Literary example: Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts; also read ‘Some Notes on Miss L’ (MAS 479).
Simmel and the city as alienated identity
Adorno’s critique of mass culture
Kracauer and the pleasures of the Mass Ornament
Gender
Filmic desire
Week 10: The Politics of Modernism
Reading: Marx (MASD 5,6); Morris (27), Trotsky (229); Radical aesthetics – Meyerhold (240), Gan
(298), Moholy-Nagy (299), LEF (305) – vs. Zhdanov on Socialist Realism, 1934 (524) and Lukács either
side of that divide (229, 584); Hitler (560); Read (526), Gill (530), Stead (536), Dos Passos (548),
Cornford (548), Jameson (556), Siquerios (595), Breton et al (597).
Literary Example: Ezra Pound, usura and Italian Cantos (h/o); a handout of American political
writing of the twenties and thirties (h/o of poems by: Muriel Rukeyser and others); visual material
from Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Recovery of Cultural
Memory (h/o).
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politics and the avante garde
socialist realism
propaganda and commitment
Fascism and anti-Fascism
Week 11: Geographies of Modernism: Race, Empire, Nation
Reading from MAS: Frazer (33), Blavatsky (31); T E Hulme, from ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’.
(handout). We will also discuss examples which may include include visual work by Picasso and
Gauguin, a short film by Len Lye, and ‘Jazz’ concerti by Stravinski and others.
Literary examples: Edith Sitwell, ‘Gold Coast Customs’; Vachel Lindsay, ‘The Congo’; Countee
Cullen, ‘Heritage’; Bolo and other poems by T.S. Eliot (all h/o); and Nella Larsen’s novella Passing.
Primitivism and abstraction
the wisdom of the ancients
Modernism and Occultism
Civilization and its discontents
Modernism’s geography
Week 12:
Modernism and Gender
Reading in MAS: Pound (‘Preface to the Natural Philosophy of Love’), Bebel (60), Fawcett (83),
Gilman (185), Riding (479), Richardson (485).
Literary texts: Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas; and Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
(1940), ch. 9 parts 2-3 (h/o).
Topics
the attack on tradition
feminism and franchise
women and space
women and culture
man-made language
feminine sexuality
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SECONDARY SOURCES
Note: not all texts listed here are in the College library – it is expected that, particularly when
writing dissertations, MA students will use the wider resources offered by the University of London
(Senate House) Library and the British Library; and that they will flesh out the reading here on
individual authors using the MLA bibliography on CD-Rom and other bibliographies.
General
Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism (1997)
Alfred Appel Jnr, Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (2002)
Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998)
Tim Armstrong, Modernism (2005) [recommended general text]
Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987)
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank (1990)
Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1983)
David Bradshaw, ed. A Concise Companion to Modernism (2003) [recommended general text]
Peter Brooker, ed. Modernism/Postmodernism (1992)
Malcolm Bradbury & James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: 1830-1930 (1976) [influential]
Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avante-Garde (1984) [distinguishes modernism and avante-garde
more sharply than many; cf. Hyssen]
Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-1914 (1994)
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avante-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism (1987)
Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places (1998)
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (1999)
Sarah Danius, The Seneses of Modernism: Techology, Perception and Aesthetics (2002)
Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (1991)
J. H. Dettmar & Stephen Watts, eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self-promotion, Canonization,
Rereading (1996)
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongerel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995) [good, esp. on Harlem]
Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction & Culture (1994)
Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (1990)
Peter Faulkner, ed., A Modernist Reader (1986)
Briony Fer et al, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (1993)
Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey (1986)
Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth
Century, 3 Vols. (1988, 1989, 1994)
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)
Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910-1945 (2004) [recommended general text]
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1982) [mostly art]
Andreas Hyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1980)
Jo Anna Isaak , The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts (1986)
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971)
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983) [intellectual context]
Rosalind Kraus, The Originality of the Avante-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1987) [art]
Edward Larrisey, Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry: The Language of Gender and Objects (1990)
Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (1982) [Anglo-American canonical modernism: good
on intellectual context]
Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1998)
Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (1993) [layout, typography]
Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism (1998)
Mark Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 19051920 (2001)
Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995) [recommended general text]
Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999)
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avante-Garde, Avante-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture
(1988), The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (1985), The
Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (198 )
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Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avante-Garde (1968)
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998)
Ronald Schleifer, Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory
(1990)
Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture,
1880–1930 (2001)
Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993)
Bonnie Kime Scott, ed. The Gender of Modernism (1990) [good revisionist anthology]
Bonnie Kime Scott , Refiguring Modernism: The Women of 1928 (1995)
Stan Smith, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (1994)
Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature & Culture in Modernist America (1987)
David Trotter, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English
and Irish Poetry (1984)
Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (1991) [general, fun]
Richard Weston, Modernism (1996) [focus on art, architecture & design]
Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (1989)
Journals of particular interest include Modernism-Modernity, Journal of Modern Literature,
Twentieth-Century Literature.
Futurism, Dada
Additional primary reading: Futurist Manifestos, ed. U. Apollonio (1973); F. T. Marinetti, Selected
Writings, trans. R.W. Flint (1972); Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos & Lampisteries (1977); Lucy
Lippard, ed., Dada on Art (1971); Robert Motherwell, ed, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology
(1967) [includes critical material].
Secondary reading from the general list: Nicholls, Modernisms; Perloff, The Futurist Moment; Burger,
Theory of the Avante-Garde; Bradbury & McFarlane, Modernism; Watson, Strange Bedfellows (on
New York Dada)
Cinzia S Blum, The Other Modernism: Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (1996) SH
Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avante-Garde (1993)
Paul Mann, The Theory-Death f the Avante-Garde (1991)
Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory: 1909-1915 (1968)
Clara Orban, The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and Surrealism (1997)
Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (1978)
Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avante-Garde from Rimbaud
through Postmodernism (1985)
Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzalla, Futurism (1978)
John Erikson, Dada: Performance, Poetry and Art (1984)
Imagism & Vorticism
Additional primary reading: Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones (Penguin, 1972).
Secondary reading from the general list: Kenner, Nicholls, Larrisey, Levenson, Perloff (Dance of the
Intellect, ch.2; Poetics of Indeterminacy:), Bradbury & McFarlane; Albright, Trotter. Also:
Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1976) [legacy of Vorticism]
Ian F.A. Bell. Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (1981)
Stanley Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter in the History of Modern Poetry (1972)
Richard Cork, Vorticism & Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (1976-77), esp. vol I.
John T. Gage, In The Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (1981)
James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (1988) [interesting on the occult
sources of the ‘secret doctrine’ of the Image]
Timothy Materer, Vortex: Pound, Eliot and Lewis (1979)
Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (1998)
Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (1986)
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Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism & the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (1995) [theory]William C.
Wees, Vorticism and the English Avante-Garde (1972)
Marketing the Men of 1914
Secondary reading from the general reading list: Rainey (in particular), Morrison, Nicholls, Levenson,
North (both books), Trotter, Sherry, Smith, Perloff and others. There are, of course, a huge number
of studies of both Pound and Eliot. On The Waste Land you could look at, among other works:
Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1984)
Graham Clarke, ed., T. S. Eliot: Critical Assessments (4 vols., 1990). [A good place to go for the
historical record from publication onwards]
Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (1987)
Harriet Davidson, T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in The Waste Land (1985)
Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watts, eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self-promotion, Canonization and
Rereading (1996)
Wayne Koestlenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (1989) [on the sexual
politics of collaboration]
A D Moody, ed., The Waste Land in Different Voices (1974)
Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1983)
David Trotter, ‘Modernism and Empire: reading The Waste Land’, Critical Quarterly 28/ 1-2 (1986):
143-53.
Surrealism
Primary: among many other texts, Andre Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. R. Seaver & H.
Lane (1973), Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (1960) and Mad Love (2001); Andre Breton and Philippe
Soupault, The Magnetic Fields, trans. David Gascoyne (1985); Louis Aragon, Treatise on Style, trans.
Alyson Waters (1991); The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology; Surrealist Love Poems, ed. Mary Ann
Caws (2001).
Secondary material from the general list: chapter in Nicholls, Kraus (plus The Optical Unconscious,
1993). Also:
Anna Balakian, Andre Breton: Magus of Surrealism (1971)
Mary Ann Caws & R. Kuenzli, eds., Surrealism and Women (1991)
Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (1997)
Katherine Conley, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Women in Surrealism (1996)
Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1993)
Whitney Chadwick, ed., Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation (1998)
Haim N. Finkelstein, Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object (1979)
Herbert S. Gerschmann, The Surrealist Revolution in France (1974) [rather negative]
Jennifer Mundy, ed., Surrealism: Desire Unbound (2001) [Tate exhibition catalogue].
Clara Orban, The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and Surrealism (1997)
Jose Pierre, Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928-1932 (1992).
Penelope Rosemount, ed., Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998)
Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avante-Garde 1920-1950
(1995)
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (1965)
The Great War as Trauma
The accounts of the Somme in the set reading come from Anne Powell, ed., The Fierce Light: The
Battle of the Somme July-November 1916. Prose and Poetry (1996). More material can be found in
two collections: Women's Fiction and the Great War, ed. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (1997);
Women, Men and the Great War: an anthology of stories, ed. Trudi Tate (1995); and in Tim Cross,
ed., The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology (1988). Two classic English war
memoirs are Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Sassoon’s Sherston’s Progress; two fictional trilogies
investigate the war, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End and R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy
(both 1924-6). American materials include Hemingway’s In Our Time and the war novels of Dos
Passos, Faulkner (Soldier’s Pay), and e. e. cummings (The Enormous Room).
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Writings by women relating to the war include (among many other texts) Rebecca West’s The Return
of the Soldier, May Sinclair’s The Tree of Heaven, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Rose Macaulay’s Noncombatants and Others, Willa Cather’s One of Ours, and Stein’s Wars I have Seen. The war records
of nurses are also worth considering: see e.g. Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929) and Helen
Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet (1930); and the collection edited by Margaret Higonnet, Nurses at the
Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War (2001) [includes Borden and others].
If you want to look more closely at shell-shock, a good starting point in the period is F.W. Mott’s
influential War Neuroses and Shell-Shock (1919) [BL]; more recent histories are listed below. On the
background to the ‘shock debate’ and modernity, from the 1880s to Freud, see Eric Michael Kaplan,
‘Trains, Brains and Sprains: Railway Spine and the Origins of Psychoneuroses’, Bulletin of the History
of Medicine 69 (1995): 387-419; also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The
Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1980).
Secondary reading from the general list: Ann Douglas (chs. 4-5) and Kern are both very good; as,
(with more reservations) are Gilbert & Gubar. Also (including background & theory):
Anthony Babington, Shell-Shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis (2003)
Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First
World War (1996)
Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (1996)
Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914-1918 and After (1989)
Agnes Cardinal, Jane Goldman & Judith Hattaway, eds., Women’s Writing of the First World War
Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (1993)
Helen M. Cooper et al, eds., Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (1989)
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War & the Birth of the Modern Age (1989)
Chris Feudtner, ‘Minds the Dead have Ravished: Shell-Shock, History and the Ecology of Disease
Systems’, History of Science 31 (1993).
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
Margaret Higonnet, ed., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (1987)
Samuel Hynes, War Imagined The First World War In English Culture (1991)
Peter Leese, Shell Shock (2002)
George L. Mosse, ‘Shell-Shock as Social Disease’, Journal of Contemporary History 35:1 (2000), 101-8.
John Onions, English Fiction and the Drama of the Great War, 1918-39 (1990)
Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Ideology & Identity in the First World War (1994)
Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (1993)
Steve Pinkerton, ‘Trauma and Cure in Rebecca West's “The Return of the Soldier”’, Journal of
Modern Literature, 32: 1 2008): 1-12.
Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003)
Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (2000)
Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein (1993)
Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914-1994 (2000)
Trudi Tate, Modernism, History, and The First World War (1998)
Vitalism and the body
Primary: Pound, ‘The Critic as Scientist’; Preface to The Natural Philosophy of Love; Rebecca West,
The Strange Necessity (1928); Williams, Spring and All (1923).
Secondary reading from general list: Kern (see also his The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns
[1992]); Tichi; Albright. Also:
Ian F.A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (1981).
Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglas, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist
Controversy (1992)
David F. Channell, The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (1991).
Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (1996) [good chs. on Williams and Lawrence]
Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895-1919 (1986)
Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination 1860-1900 (1984)
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Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks:1800/1900 (1990) [on technologies/flows of information]
Bergson, Time, Taylorism
Primary: Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907); Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927)
Secondary Reading from general list: Kern, Levenson, Butler, Armstrong (ch.2). Also:
Burwick, Frederick, and Paul Douglass, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist
Controversy (1992)
Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (1993) this is on the ‘opposition’, as it were – Taylorism and its time-philosophy.
James F. Knapp, Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work (1988) [also Taylorism]
Lisa Steinman, Made in America: Science, Technology and American Modernism (1987).
Distraction, Technology and the City
Primary: Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (1997); Henry Adams, ‘The Virgin
and the Dynamo’ (1905); writings of Benjamin covered below.
Secondary reading from the general list: Danius, The Senses of Modernism; Crary, Suspensions of
Perception.; Armstrong, Modernism. Also:
Tim Armstrong, ‘Two Types of Shock in Modernity’, Critical Quarterly 42:1 (2000): 60-74.
Rachel Bowlby, ‘Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flaneuse’, in Still Crazy After All
these Years (1992) [also in New Feminist Discourses, ed. Isobel Armstrong (1992)]
Desmond Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (2003)
Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903 (1991)
Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (2000)
Modernism and Mass Culture (Adorno and others)
T W Adorno & Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Englightenment (1944); T W Adorno, The Culture
Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. Bernstein (1991); The Stars Down to Earth and other
essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Crook (1993); George Lukács, ‘The Ideology of
Modernism’, in Realism in Our Time (1964); Huxley, Brave New World (1932).
Secondary: from general list: Huyssen vs. North, 1922 (especially), Danius (ch.1), Berman, Poggioli,
Williams. Also:
Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures (1989)
Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (1996)
Simon Jarvis, Adorno (1993)
Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: A Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno
(1982)
Franco Moretti, Signs taken for Wonders (1983) [see Eliot essay]
James Naremore and Patrick Bratlinger, eds., Modernity and Mass Culture (1992)
Steve Pile, The Body and the City (1996). General theoretical approach (inc. Freud & Benjamin).
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1988)
Krakauer and Benjamin
Primary: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1973) and One-Way Street (1978);
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (1995).
Secondary: the Bibliography on Benjamin is very large (he is used everywhere in cultural & film
studies), and I have not attempted to reproduce it; there is much less on Kracauer:
Theodor Adorno, ‘Letters to Walter Benjamin’, in his Aesthetics and Politics (1977), 110-33
[important critique of Benjamin at the time of the ‘Artwork’ essay, stressing need to
distinguish between different technologies of production, reproduction and distribution]
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1999)
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Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, ‘Race’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance
(1988). On Kracauer, Taylorism, fascism.
Howard Caygill, Walter Banjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998)
Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin & the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1993)
Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1985).
Miriam Hansen, ‘Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer’s Early Writings on Film and Mass Culture, New
German Critique 54 (1991).
---------, ‘“With Skin and Hair”: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseilles 1940’, Critical Inquiry 19 (1993),
437-69.
Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000)
Laura Marcus & Lynne Nead, eds., The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (1998). Reprints essays
published in the journal New Formations in 1993.
Gary Smith, ed., On Walter Benjamin (1988)
Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1994)
Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (1993) [on Kracauer]
Modernism and Film (in addition to the above)
Primary: Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939); Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, The Captain’s
Death Bed and Other Essays (1950), 166-171; James Donald et al, eds., Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema
and Modernism (1998) [excellent anthology of the radical journal in which Dorothy Richardson, H.D.,
Bryher and other writers published].
Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (1998).
Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (1995).
Mary Ann Doane, ‘Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity’, Differences 5.2 (1993), 1-23.
Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avante-Garde’, Wide
Angle 8,3-4 (1986), 63-70.
Miriam Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’,
Modernism/Modernity 6:2 (1999): 59-77.
Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007)
Rachel Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (2000)
Julian Murphet & Lydia Rainford, eds., Literature and Visual Technologies: Writing After Cinema
(2003)
Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (2005)
Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film & the Modern Novel (1976)
On Nathanael West and mass culture/cinema
Rita Barnard, ‘“When You Wish Upon a Star”: Fantasy, Experience and Mass Culture in Nathanael
West’, American Literature 66:2 (1994): 325-51.
Justus Nieland, ‘West’s Deadpan: Affect, Slapstick, and Publicity in Miss Loneleyhearts,’ Novel 38:1
(2004): 57-83.
Richard Simon, ‘Between Capra and Adorno: West’s Day of the Locust and the Movies of the 1930s’,
Modern Language Quarterly, 54:4 (1993): 513-34.
Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (1993) [excellent]
Jonathan Veitch, American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the
1930s (1997) [also very useful]
Primitivism
Secondary reading from general list: Doyle, North (both books), Armstrong. Also:
Elazar Barkan & Ronald Bush, eds., Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture
of Modernism (1995)
Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot (1987)
Robert Frazer, ed., Sir James Frazier and the Literary Imagination (1990)
James F. Knapp, ‘Primitivism and the Modern’, boundary 2, 15: 1/2 (1986-1987): 365-379.
T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture
(1994)
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Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism
(1998)
Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (1994)
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
Carole Sweeney, From fetish to subject: race, modernism, and primitivism, 1919-1935 (2004)
David Trotter, The English Novel in History 1895-1920 (1993)
Dream
Andrew Gibson, ed., Reading Joyce’s Circe (1994)
Laura Marcus, ed., Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays
(2000).
Race and the Harlem Renaissance
From general list: Baker, Douglas. Also:
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black
Internationalism (2003)
George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995)
James de Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (1990)
Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995).
And on Larsen (there are many other articles locatable via the MLA) see also:
E. K. Ginsberg ed., Passing and Fictions of Identity (1996)
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (1994)
C. Larson, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen (1993).
Gender and Sexuality in Modernism
From general list: Benstock, DeKoven, Scott, Gilbert and Gubar, Nicholls and Armstrong. Also:
Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (1998)
Kathleen Wheeler, Modernist Women Writers and Narrative Art (1994)
Sandra M. Chait, ed., Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics and Modernist Aesthetics (2005)
On Barnes specifically: Tyrus Miller from the general list; and
Mary Lynne Broe, ed., Silence and Power: A Re-evaluation of Djuna Barnes (1991)
Bridget Elliott and Jo Anne Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)positionings (1994)
Dianne Chisholm, ‘Obscene Modernism: Eros Noire and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes’,
American Literature 69:1 (1997).
Monika Kaup, ‘The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes’, Modernism-Modernity 12:1 (2005).
Victoria Smith,’A Story Besides(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’, PMLA
114 (1999).
The Politics of Modernism
Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.
Nelson and Grossberg (1988), pp. 317-33.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1973).
Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (2001)
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1983).
Malcolm Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971).
David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and
Benjamin (1988).
Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (1971)
Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (2000).
Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound (1991)
Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-garde: Nation and Empire, 1901-1918 (2000)
Lillian Robinson & Lisa Vogel, ‘Modernism and History’, New Literary History 3:1 (1971), 177-99.
Theories of the Avant-Garde
Theodor Adorno, The Philosophy of Modern Music (1973).
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Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 (1994).
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism (1987).
Antonio Gramsci, ‘Marinetti the Revolutionary’ (1916) and ‘Theatre and Cinema’ (1921), in
Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, pp. 214-16.
Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995).
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture
(1986).
Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968).
Edward Timms and Peter Collier (eds), Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical
Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe (1988).
John Weightman, The Concept of the Avant-Garde: Explorations in Modernism (1973).
Raymond Williams, ‘The Politics of the Avant-Garde’ and ‘Language and the AvantGarde’, in The Politics of Modernism, pp. 49-80.
Marxism and Modernism
Theodor Adorno, from letter to Walter Benjamin (1936) and from ‘On the Fetish character in Music
and the Regression of Listening’ (1938), in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents, pp. 577-84.
Ernst Bloch, from The Principle of Hope (1938-47), in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents, pp. 591-95.
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
Georg Lukács, from The Theory of the Novel (1920) and from ‘Realism in the Balance’, in Modernism:
An Anthology of Sources and Documents, pp. 225-29.
Georg Lukács, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1963).
Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (London: Verso, 1985).
Karl Marx, from letter to Ruge, September 1843, in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents, pp. 5-6
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from The Communist Manifesto (1848), in Modernism: An Anthology
of Sources and Documents, pp. 6-8.
Leon Trotsky, from Literature and Revolution (1923), in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents, pp. 229-32; 584-90.
Modernism and Ethics
Dennis Brown, The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature (1989).
Peter Collier and Judy Davies (eds), Modernism and the European Unconscious (1990).
David Craig, ‘Loneliness and Anarchy: Aspects of Modernism’, in The Real Foundations: Literature
and Social Change (1974), pp. 171-94.
James de Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (1990).
Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979).
Gabriel Josopovici, The Lessons of Modernism and Other Essays (1977).
Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality (1991).
George Orwell, from ‘Inside the Whale’ (1933), in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and
Documents, pp.605-10.
Modernism and Empire
Howard J. Booth & Nigel J. Rigby, eds., Modernism and Empire (2000).
Terry Eagleton, ‘Modernism, Myth and Monopoly Capitalism’, in The Eagleton Reader, ed. Stephen
Regan (1998).
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black
Internationalism (2003)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, ed.
Seamus Deane (1990).
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism?’, in The Politics of Modernism, pp. 31-5.