The Shocks of the New: Modernist Poetry and Prose 2016-2017
5AAEB048
Modernism saw an unprecedented explosion of experiment and innovation in
the arts, in a period of intense technological and social change. This module
introduces key works of modernist literature, mostly written in English, though
several are by émigré writers. It examines the ways in which modernists
developed new forms, whether narrative, poetic, or dramatic, through which to
reimagine the representation of consciousness, character, personality,
subjectivity, memory, and time. These traditionally humanist notions are
approached in modernism by a series of challenges to humanism: through
classicism; anti-romanticism; a turn from organicism and naturalism to an
elaboration of form and technique; impersonality; fragmentation; abstraction;
and the absurd.
After an introductory session on modernists’ self-presentation through
manifestos, the course will focus on modernist experiments with narrative
voice, exploring the ways that modernist writers playfully complicated the
relationship between reader and narrator; we will also think in depth about
modernist experiments with time, memory, and un/consciousness, analysing
the modernist preoccupation with representing the subjective experience of
being, feeling, and time. We end with a consideration of late modernism and
its legacy. Throughout the course aesthetic questions about style and
technique run alongside broader questions about history, politics and
sexuality, and the texts are set in the context of contemporary visual art,
cinema and other media, psychoanalysis and science.
Examination:
Assessment: 1 x 1500 word commentary (15%) and 1 x 2,500 word essay
(85%).
Teaching pattern: 1 x 1-hour lecture and 1 x 1-hour seminar weekly.
The main texts can be obtained cheaply, or from libraries. Poems will be
provided for week 5, although you are encouraged to read widely. The
Manifestos studied in week one can be found on KEATS, as can some of the
critical literature.
Course Outline and Reading
Week 1. Introduction: Modernism and Manifestos, including Futurism,
Impressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Surrealism. Please read the following
for the seminar:
Marinetti, F. T., ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), in Futurist
Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 1924. Also Boccioni et. al., ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’ (1910), ibid., 24-27.
[On Keats]
Blast, ed. Wyndham Lewis, facsimiles (Santa Rosa 1981)
[at
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=1158591480633184&view=mjp_ob
ject]
from No. 1:
· Long Live the Vortex!: 7-8
· Manifesto—I: 11-28
· Newcastle (Wadsworth, Edward): 29-29
· Manifesto—II: 30-43
· Vortex. Pound: 153-154
· Vortex. Gaudier Brzeska: 155-158
from No. 2:
· Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska: (Written from the Trenches) (Gaudier-Brzeska): 3334
· Vortex (Lewis, Wyndham): 91-91
· Blasts and Blesses: 92-93
Breton, André, ‘Surrealist Manifesto’, [at
http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto]
or in Manifestoes of surrealism (University of Michigan Press, 1972), 1-48.
The following texts will be considered in following weeks along with
their respective authors, but you may also wish to read them now (all of
these are available on KEATS):
Hueffer, Ford Madox, ‘On Impressionism.’ Poetry and Drama 2.6 (1914): 16775 (First Article); 323-34 (Second Article).
James, Henry, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in Literary Criticism: Essays on
Literature: American Writers: English Writers. (New York: Library of America
1984), pp. 44-65.
Woolf, Virginia, ‘Modern Fiction’, The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press,
1968), pp. 184-95.
Eliot, T. S., 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', in: The Selected Prose of T. S.
Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 37-44
Lawrence, D. H., Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985: the following essays:
‘Morality and the Novel’, pp. 169-76
'The Novel', pp. 177-90
"Why the Novel Matters." pp. 191-8.
"The Novel and the Feelings." pp. 199-205
2. Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897). (See also the Preface to What
Maisie Knew on KEATS).
3. Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann’s (1913) (Penguin edition, translated
by Lydia Davies, *it is essential that students use this edition*)
4. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
5. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
READING WEEK
6. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, especially The Waste Land (1922)
7. D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)
8. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
9. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
10. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)
Secondary Bibliography specifically related to Weekly Readings:
The starred texts can be found on KEATS
Attridge, Derek, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990)
*Beckett, Samuel, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: Calder, 1976) (pp. 1135 on KEATS)
*Beer, Gillian, ‘The Waves: the life of anybody’; and ‘’Physics, Sound and
Substance: later Woolf’, in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 74-91, 112-24.
Bridgman, Richard, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press,
1970)
Briggs, Julia, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Allen Lane, 2005)
Britzolakis, Christina, ‘Technologies of Vision in Henry James's What Maisie
Knew’
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 3, The Turn-of-the-Century American
Novel (Summer, 2001), pp. 369-390
*Brooker, Peter, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound
(London: Faber, 1979), pp. 183-225.
Danchev, Alex, ed., 100 Artists' Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists
(London: Penguin, 2011)
*Deane, Seamus, ‘Introduction’, Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(London: Penguin, 1992), pp. vii-xliii
Eliot, T. S., 'Hamlet', 'The Metaphysical Poets', 'Ulysses, Order and Myth', all in:
The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975): pp.
45-49, 59-67, 175-8.
Eliot T.S., The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed.
Valerie Eliot (London: Faber, 1971)
Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd. 3rd ed. With a new foreword by the
author. (New York: Vintage (Knopf), 2004)
Fernihough, Anne, ed., The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence (CUP,
2001)
Hampson, Robert, and Max Saunders, eds, Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003); section II.
James, Henry, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (1935) (Boston:
Northeastern UP, 1984), pp. 140-58.
Jones, Peter, ed. Imagist Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1972), pp. 61-69
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era: The Age of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce
and Wyndham Lewis. (Faber and Faber, 1972).
*Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile: 1912-1922
(Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 390-98 and 832-3.
Lawrence, D. H., Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the
Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (CUP 2004)
Lee, Hermione, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (1977)
Mahaffey, Vicki, Reauthorizing Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988)
Moody, A. D. ed., The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: CUP,
1994)
Moretti, Franco, Signs taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1983), ch. 8
Ricks, Christopher, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
Saunders, Max, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 1 (Oxford: OUP, 1996)
Saunders, Max, Self Impression (Oxford: OUP, 2010)
Shattuck, Roger, Proust (London: Fontana/Collins, 1975)
Snaith, Anna, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Macmillan, 2000)
Stein , Gertrude, ‘Three Portraits of Painters’, in Selected Writings of Gertrude
Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Random House 1946)
*Tanner, Tony, Henry James II (Harlow: Longman, 1979), pp. 43-7
Wyndham Lewis, Percy, Time and Western Man
Further General Bibliography arranged thematically
Modernist Experiments with Time
Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution (1907)
Gillies, Mary Ann, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996)
Modernist Experiments with Narrative Voice and Point of View
Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic
Form from
Conrad to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991)
Modernism and the Visual Arts
Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: literature, music and painting 1900-1916
(Clarendon, 1994)
Feigel, Lara, Literature, Cinema, Politics, 1930-1945, Reading between the
Frames
(Edinburgh: EUP, 2010)
Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (1980;
updated
and enlarged edition, Thames & Hudson, 1991)
Marcus, Laura, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period
(Oxford:
OUP: 2007)
Roston, Murray. Modernist Patterns in Literature and the Visual Arts (New York:
NYUP,
1999)
Schwarz, Daniel. Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationships
Between
Modern Art and Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
Torgovnick, Marianna. The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James,
Lawrence, and Woolf. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Modernism, Sexuality and Gender
Hanscombe, Gillian and Smyers, Virginia. Writing for their Lives: the Modernist
Women
1910-1940 (The Women’s Press, 1987).
Kime Scott, Bonnie (ed.). The Gender of Modernism (Indiana UP, 1995)
Stevens, Hugh and Howlett, Caroline (eds). Modernist Sexualities (Manchester:
MUP,
2000)
General modernist criticism
Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the politics of
community (CUP
2001).
Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, James (eds). Modernism (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976).
Childs, Peter. Modernism. (London: Routledge, 2000).
Faulkner, Peter (ed). Modernist Reader: Modernism in England 1910-1930
(Batsford, 1986).
Ferrall, Charles. Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (Cambridge: CUP,
2001).
Goldman, Jane. Modernism: Image to Apocalypse (Palgrave 2003).
Josipovici, Gabriel, Whatever Happened to Modernism? (Yale, 2010)
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era: The Age of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce
and Wyndham Lewis. (London: Faber and Faber, 1972).
Kermode, Frank, Essays on Fiction: 1971-82. (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul,
1983)
Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds). Modernism: An
Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press 1998)
Levenson, Michael, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary
Doctrine 19081922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
Lyon, Janet. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999).
Matz, Jessie. Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: CUP,
2001)
Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995)
Saint-Amour, Paul. The Copywrights. (Ithaca: Cornell, 2003).
Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction (Prentice Hall, 1998).
Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: MUP,
1998).
Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats.
(Stanford University Press, 1995).
Trotter, David, The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (London: Routledge,
1993).
Trotter, David, Paranoid Modernism, Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the
Professionalisation of English Society (Oxford: OUP, 2001)
Whitworth, Michael. Einstein’s Wake: relativity, metaphor and modernist
literature
(Oxford: OUP, 2002).
Wilson, Ian, Gould, Warwick and Chernaik, Warren (eds). Modernist Writers and
the
Marketplace (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
Also see the journal Modernism/Modernity.
Weblinks
The Modernist Journals Project: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/
Tate on Vorticism: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/thevorticists/