Reading Modernity

MA in Modern Literature and Culture Core Course: Reading Modernity Convenor: John David Rhodes This course is an introduction to some of the key critical and theoretical debates in the study of modern literature and culture. All students in the MA will take the course together so as to foster early on the sense of intellectual community. It is expected that the material encountered in the core course will resonate with and fortify the work students will do in their options. The essential project of the course is a thorough investigation and interrogation of the concepts of modernity and modernism. Students will also be asked to attend two sessions of complementary film screenings. nb: there may be some slight modifications in the syllabus, week to week, but the below suggests the general scheme of things Students may find the following reading list helpful in preparing for the course. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (any edition) Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (Verso, 1983) Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minnesota, 1984) David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity (MIT, 1986) David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Johns Hopkins, 1989) Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT, 1995) Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (Penguin, 1991) Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. (Scribner,1931) David Bradshaw, A Concise Companion to Modermism (Blackwell, 2003) Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Cornell University Press, 1990) Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1984) Michael Levenson, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Peter Nicholls, Modernism: A Literary Guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (Yale University Press,1998) Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Indiana University Press, 1990) David Trotter, The English Novel in History 1895-1920 (Routledge, 1993) Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso, 1989) Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Indiana, 1986) Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minnesota, 1984) Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke, 1993) Brian Wallis, ed. Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New Museum of Contemporary Art/David R. Godine, 1984) Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin Modern Classics, 2001—and other editions) week 1 preliminary meeting week 2

Reading the Modern JDR Lionel Trilling, ‘On the Teaching of Modern Literature’ in Beyond Culture (Penguin, 1967) Paul de Man, ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’ in Blindness and Insight (Minnesota, 1983) Week 3 Technology, gender, capital: T. S. Eliot, 'The Waste Land' Lawrence Rainey 'The Waste Land' is available in several different collections of Eliot's poetry, all published by Faber and Faber: Selected Poems, Collected Poems, Complete Poems and Plays, 'The Waste Land' and Other Poems. Supplementary reading: Valerie Eliot (ed.), 'The Waste Land': A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (Harcourt Brace, 1971). Cleanth Brooks, '"The Waste Land": Critique of the Myth,' in Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 136-172. Photocopy available. Hugh Kenner, 'The Urban Apocalypse,' in A. Walton Litz (ed.), Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the 'The Waste Land' (Princeton University Press, 1973), 23-49. Carol Christ, 'Gender, Voice, and Figuration in Eliot's Early Poetry,' in Ronald Bush (ed.), T. S. Eliot: the Modernist in History (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23-37. week 4 Modernism via the Manifesto JDR André Breton, ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’ F.T. Marinetti, ‘The Futurist Manifesto’ Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto’ Dziga Vertov, selections from Kino Eye (Annette Michelson, ed. [California, 1985]) Stan Brakhage, ‘Metaphors of Vision’ Frank O’Hara, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ recommended supplementary reading: Wordsworth and Coleridge, ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’ (1802) André Breton, Nadja (Penguin, 1999) Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Movement (Chicago, 1986) Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look (MIT, 1997) Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (California, 1995) week 5

Modernism and Literary Criticism Derek Attridge ‘Modernism’ as a fully-fledged critical term in the English-speaking world postdates the literary period it denominates. Although the high point of modernism is taken to be the 1920s, and its outer limits around 1890 and 1940, the term did not attain critical currency until the 1960s. In this seminar we will discuss some of the key texts in the gradual emergence of a sense that this period had a peculiar importance in the history of literature, beginning and ending with a reading of Joyce: T.S. Eliot’s and Jacques Derrida’s. students are encouraged to prepare by reading in the following texts listed on the preparatory reading list: Edmund Wilson (Axel’s Castle); David Bradshaw; Astradur Eysteinsson; Michael Levenson; Peter Nicholls; Lawrence Rainey; Bonnie Kime Scott; David Trotter; Raymond Williams week 6 reading week-no meeting week 7 The Brecht-Lukács Debates JDR Aesthetics and Politics, afterword by Fredric Jameson, translation editor Ronald Taylor (Verso, 2002) *students are encouraged to order their own copies of this book week 8 Psychoanalysis and Realism Victoria Coulson Freud, 'Fetishism' and 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ('Dora')', both available in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis) and the Penguin (previously Pelican) Freud Library. Roland Barthes, 'The Reality Effect', in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge University Press, 1982), and in Realism, ed. Lilian R. Furst (Longman, 1992) Adam Phillips, 'Symptoms', chapter 2 of his Terrors and Experts (Faber,1995) Leo Bersani, 'Realism and the Fear of Desire', in his A Future for Astyanax (Little, Brown, 1976/ Boyars, 1978) Week 9 Modernism and Anticolonialism Laura Chrisman Aime Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to my Native Land (preferably, the Bloodaxe bilingual edition)

Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press/NYU Press edition) supplementary reading: Frantz Fanon, 'Concerning Violence' and 'On National Culture', from The Wretched of the Earth Robin D G Kelley, 'A Poetics of Anticolonialism', introduction to Monthly Review Press edition of Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism; also in Monthly Review Press, volume 51, number 6, 1999 (available online) Benita Parry, 'Resistance Theory: Theorising Resistance', in her Postcolonial Studies; also in Padmini Mongia, ed, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, and in Francis Barker et al, eds, Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory Michael Richardson et al, Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean week 10 Tropes of Modernity and Postmodernity: The City and the Hotel JDR Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine [Chicago, 1971]) Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’; ‘The Hotel Lobby’ (in The Mass Ornament, ed. Thomas Y. Levin [Harvard, 1995) Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed.) Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (chapter 1) Anthony Vidler, ‘Spaces of Passage: The Architecture of Estrangement: Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin’ (in Warped Space [MIT, 2000]) students are also encouraged to read around in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (Belknap/Harvard, 1999)