Modernities: Literature, Theory & Culture
The Core Course
The Core Course is divided into two parts: Part 1examines some of the foundational modernist movements and manifestos of the period 1900-1945, and explores some of the ways they have been and are theorised; Part 2 examines the fallout of these movements, in practices and theories, emerging over the last half century or so.
Below is an indication of topics and reading for each seminar. Updated details, including any further reading, links to etexts and other resources, will be posted on the course ‘Moodle’ site, which you should check regularly (see section 6 of the booklet).
Core Course - Part 1
Seminars in 2011-12 are as follows:-
Week 1 (Monday 19 September) Absolutely Modern (Led by John Coyle & Vassiliki Kolocotroni)
Reading: ‘Manifestos’ section of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (MASD) Alain Badiou, ‘Avant-gardes’, from The Century; Martin Puchner, chapters 5-8 of Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes and the Avant-Gardes. See also: Peter Bürger, ‘The Avant-Gardiste Work of Art’, from Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Week 2 (Monday 26 September) Time (Led by Matthew Creasy)
Reading: Henri Bergson, from Creative Evolution (MASD and handouts); Gertrude Stein, from The Making of Americans (handout), from ‘Composition as Explanation’ (MASD); Dorothy Richardson, from Pilgrimage (handout); Percy Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, from Blast (MASD); Fillipo Tomasso Marinetti, from ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’; Guillaume Apollinaire, from The Cubist Painters (MASD).
Week 3 (Monday 3 October) Reification (Led by Gavin Miller)
Reading: Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (MASD); Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (MASD); D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; D.H. Lawrence, ‘Why the Novel Matters’ (handout).
Week 4 (Monday 10 October) The Language of the Night (Joyce & Freud) (Led by Matthew Creasy)
Reading: Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci; James Joyce, ‘Circe’ (from Ulysses). See also: Freud, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle; D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious; selected passages from Jung and Ernest Jones (on Moodle).
Week 5 (Monday 17 October) Writers at War (Led by Willy Maley)
Reading: Extracts from writings on the Spanish Civil War by W.H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.
Week 6: READING, THINKING, WRITING WEEK
Week 7 (Monday 31 October) Nation – Scotland and Modernism (Led by Alan Riach)
Reading: Hugh MacDiarmid, from Collected Poems - Volume 1 (ed. Aitken and Grieve), esp. the lyrics of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle; ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’ (MASD); from Selected Prose (ed. Riach), esp. ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’, and ‘Scottish Arts and Letters: the Present Position and Post-War Prospects’; Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair (esp. part three, Grey Granite);‘Clay’, ‘Smeddum’ and ‘Greenden’ (Smeddum: A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology).
Week 8 (Monday 7 November) Theatre and Engagement – Guest seminar led by Dr Olga Taxidou (University of Edinburgh)
Reading : Alfred Jarry, ‘Preliminary Address at the First Performance of Ubu Roi’ ; Edward Gordon Graig, from ‘The Actor and the Über-marionette’ ; ‘A Member of the Audience : Storming the Winter Palace’ ; Vsevolod Meyerhold, from ‘The Reconstruction of the Theatre’ ; Erwin Piscator, from ‘Basic Principles of Sociological Drama’ ; Eccentrism manifesto (all in MASD).
Week 9 (Monday 14 November) Radical (Led by Alex Benchimol & John Coyle)
Reading: Leon Trotsky, from Literature and Revolution (MASD); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer; Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust; John Dos Passos, from USA; ‘The Writer as Technician’ (MASD); Clifford Odets, from Waiting for Lefty (handouts).
Week 10 (Monday 21 November) Science (Led by Gavin Miller)
Reading: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (MASD); Theodor Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music’ (MASD); A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On the Concept of Function in Social Science’ (handout).
Week 11 (Monday 28 November) End (Led by Vassiliki Kolocotroni)
Reading: Samuel Beckett, Endgame; George Orwell, from ‘Inside the Whale’ (MASD); Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Leaning Tower’ (MASD); T. W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’; Alain Badiou, from On Beckett (handout).
Core Course - Part 2
Week 1 (Monday 9 January) Post (Led by Vassiliki Kolocotroni)
Reading: from Thomas Docherty ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (incl. extracts from the works of Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard); Jean Baudrillard, from The Perfect Crime; Zygmunt Bauman, from Liquid Modernity; Bruno Latour, from We Have Never Been Modern (handouts); See also: Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide; ‘Altermodernity: An Interview with Nicolas Bourriaud’, Spike 11 (2007).
Week 2 (Monday 16 January) Now (Led by Helen Stoddart)
Reading: Ali Smith, Hotel World and Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow; Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra (first 30 pages on the hyperreal); essays by Steven Connor, Peter Osbourne and Thomas Doherty in Roger Luckhurst & and Peter Marks (eds), Literature and the Contemporary; Chapters 1 and 2 of Mark Currie, About Time.
Week 3 (Monday 23 January) Memory (Led by Paddy Lyons)
Reading: Samuel Beckett, Play; Come and Go; Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor; Seamus Heaney, ‘Punishment’; Derek Mahon, ‘Lives’; ‘The Snow Party’; Eileain Ni Chuilleanain, ‘Survivors’; ‘J’ai mal à nos dents’.
Week 4 (Monday 30 January) Nation – Scotland and the Caribbean (Led by Alan Riach)
Reading: Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock; Black Marsden; The Ghost of Memory; Derek Walcott, ‘The Schooner Flight’ from The Star-Apple Kingdom; Hugh MacDiarmid, from Collected Poems – Volume 2, (ed. Aitken and Grieve), esp. ‘On a Raised Beach’ and ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’; W.S. Graham, from Collected Poems. See also: John Corbett, ‘Language, MacDiarmid and W.S. Graham’ in Brown and Riach, eds., Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature; Alan Riach, ‘Magic and Violence in Modern Scottish Fiction and the recent work of Wilson Harris’, International Journal of Scottish Literature 4, 2008 (on Moodle).
Week 5 (Monday 6 February) Mind Control, Body Building (Led by Fabienne Collignon)
Reading: Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; Laurence A. Rickels, I Think I Am Philip K. Dick, Part IV (Minneapolis, MN & London: U of Minnesota Press, 2010); Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (NY: Routledge, 1999), pp.149-181. Also available on Moodle.
Viewing: The Manchurian Candidate, 1962 (dir. John Frankenheimer)
Week 6: READING, THINKING, WRITING WEEK
Week 7 (Monday 20 February) The Personal Is Political: Embodied Protest and the Performance of Masculinity (Guest seminar led by Dr Sarah Lowndes, Glasgow School of Art)
Reading: Timothy Martin, ‘Rocking the Lifeboat with Burden, Kelley and McCarthy’, Sunshine & Noir, Art in L.A. 1960-1997; Kristine Stiles, ‘Burden of Light’, in Bewley and Tarbuck (eds) Chris Burden; from Chris Burden, Beyond the Limits; Brad Spence, Bas Jan Ader; Rugoff, Stiles and Di Pietrantonio (eds) Paul McCarthy; Janet Kraynak (ed), Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words (handouts).
Week 8 (Monday 27 February) Body - Falling and Flying: The Modern Body in Motion (Led by Helen Stoddart)
Reading: Paul Auster, Vertigo; Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus, Don DeLillo, Falling Man. Extracts to be provided from Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought; Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity; Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque..
Week 9 (Monday 5 March) Post-human (Led by Jane Goldman)
Reading: Dorothy Molloy, ‘Hare Soup’; Adrienne Rich, ‘Fox’; Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. See also: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal.
Week 10 (Monday 12 March) Fantasy (Led by Rob Maslen)
Reading: Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia; China Miéville, The City and the City. See also: Adam Roberts, The Palgrave History of Science Fiction; Fredrick Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future; Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion.
Week 11 (Monday 19 March) End Times (class)
Reading: Alain Badiou, ‘The Unreconciled’, from The Century; Slavoj Zizek, from Living in the End Times and In Defense of Lost Causes; Frank Kermode, from The Sense of an Ending (2000); Jean Baudrillard, from The Illusion of the End; Martin Puchner, ‘The Avant-Garde Is Dead: Long Live the Avant-Garde!’, in Poetry of the Revolution.