Modernities: Literature, Theory & Culture

Topic Courses

Below are brief outlines of the courses on offer this year. Detailed seminar programmes and reading lists will be made available by the course tutors.

Semester 1

African Modernities: Colonialism and Postcolonialism in the Novel (Prof. Willy Maley) – Tuesdays, 5-7pm, room 4/201

This course explores questions of modernity and postmodernity, colonialism and postcoloniality, in modern Africa through the formation and development of one particular literary form, the novel. The aim is to introduce students to the major African writers of the modern period. The course is divided into two parts. The first five seminars offer a sampling of the literature of several different countries, including such key figures as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Kenya), and Tayeb Salih (Sudan). These writers and their work – chiefly novels and memoirs – will offer a springboard for discussions around colonialism, culture, gender, language, and identity. The second part homes in on one specific national literature, that of Nigeria, from The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) to Purple Hibiscus (2003), introducing students to the key writers of that country, including Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, Wole Soyinka, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Ben Okri. Nigeria has a very rich literary tradition: Chinua Achebe is Africa’s most important writer. Wole Soyinka is Africa’s first Nobel Prize Winner. Ben Okri is the first African writer to win the Booker Prize.

Modernist Sexualities (Dr Vassiliki Kolocotroni) – Wednesdays, 5-7pm, room 4/302

This module is based on the assumption that Modernist and avant-garde experimentation with form is inextricably linked with conflicting visions of sexual identity and gendered bodies. As a closer look at work by Anglophone and European artists and thinkers will show, the forging of the Modernist aesthetic coincided with a deep anxiety about sexual difference (itself inherited from late-nineteenth century concerns but refashioned in radically new formulations) and its relation to creativity and change at both the personal and political level. Primary reading will include works by Henry James, Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Blaise Cendrars, André Breton, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, Sergei Tretyakov, Richard Wright and others, as well as contemporary scientific and political writings. Viewings of films from the ‘20s and ‘30s will offer further opportunities for discussion of some of the topic’s key motifs.

Proust in Theory (Dr John Coyle) – Wednesdays, 5-7pm, room 5/402

This module will follow not only our reading of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, but also those of critical thinkers, such as Barthes, Beckett, Benjamin, Deleuze, Genette and Kristeva, among others, whose engagement with Proust’s writing illuminates both this seminal modern text and definitions of literature and reading.

In Semester Two:

The American Counterculture, 1945-75 (Dr Chris Gair) – Thursdays 1am-12.30pm, room 5/205

This module develops students’ understanding of a selection of literary, musical and visual texts that were seen, in their time, to challenge dominant ideologies. It examines the ways in which these texts were perceived to be ‘countercultural’ and assesses the extent to which they represented real opposition to cultural orthodoxies, and the degree to which they have subsequently become new orthodoxies. Topics are likely to include: the Beat Generation (Kerouac. Di Prima, Ginsberg, etc.); gender and culture; Abstract Expressionism; music and protest (Dylan, Woodstock, etc.); new histories; the New Left; experimental fictions (Brautigan, Doctorow, etc.).

The Modern Everyday (Dr Bryony Randall) – Tuesdays, 3-5pm, room 5/205

A concern with the everyday, paradoxically, characterises some of the most experimental literature produced over the course of the last century. The modernist literature of the start of the century, often characterised as elitist, impenetrable, or disconnected from ‘ordinary’ experience of the world, may at first glance seem an unlikely place to begin an exploration of the everyday. Yet preoccupation with everyday life suffuses modernist writing at the level of content; concomitant modernist innovations in style can be seen as part of a general reorientation towards, and indeed a revaluation of, the everyday and the daily, informed by the emerging discourses of psychology and sociology. As the century progresses, this preoccupation is taken up and explored in numerous different ways; the fecundity of the everyday as aesthetic and political concept is demonstrated as it becomes the focus for explicit theoretical discussion, not least by individuals whose work often challenges and disrupts disciplinary boundaries. This special topic will pursue the daily through a diverse range of texts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century – literary, philosophical, psychological, sociological – and read these texts through the burgeoning current interest in theories of the everyday.

The Novel Now (Dr Helen Stoddart)

The historical starting point for this course is the year 2000. It has been designed to encourage students with an interest in contemporary fiction to develop their reading of this period in relation to some of the critical paradigms and problems to which they have been introduced in the core seminars (as well as introducing some new ones). The reading programme of set texts will, therefore, be proposed, discussed and agreed by the students who take the course during a meeting with the tutor which will be scheduled towards the end of Semester 1. The only limitations on choice are that the nominations should be novels (not short story collections) published in the post-2000 period, should be written (in the first instance) in English, and should be available in paperback by the start of the course. Depending on the number of students who opt to take the course, students will propose 1-2 novels each. In their nominations they will be encouraged to conspire with each other to produce as much diversity and range as possible with the aim of producing not only a snapshot of the innovations and shifts occurring in the contemporary novel, but also of making visible  some of the continuities of influence that can be traced from earlier authors, movements and genres.

Virginia Woolf Writes Modernity (Dr Jane Goldman)

If you want to make sense of modernity, modernism and modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. This module will explore the genesis of Woolf’s fiction alongside a representative range of her theoretical, critical and autobiographical writings, all of which have been central to theorising and inscribing cultures of modernity, modern living, and modernist aesthetics. A range of texts including ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-Raid’, will be read in terms of cultures of modernity, modernism, and the avant-garde and in relation to other relevant theories such as gender, sexuality and feminism; and in relation to relevant cultural events (such as the Post-impressionist Exhibitions of 1910 and 1912, and so on). Reading and research may focus on these texts or move further into Woolf’s other writings, including her fiction, and/or the writings of other modernist authors. Students may make use of Glasgow University Library’s new Woolf resources, which include the microfilms of the material in the major Woolf archives and holdings in the Woolf Studies Annual, and the published proceedings of two decades of the Annual International Woolf Conference.