Prescribed Texts

• Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
• William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
• Course Reader and Anthologies (Kafka’s short stories, Eliot’s poetry, and Reading for Writing: poetry )

This module explores different tendencies within ‘modernism’. It considers a number of texts usually classified as canonically ‘modernist’, and a range of related theoretical, philosophical and historical material. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many modernist writers and intellectuals shared a sense of disillusionment with the failed promises of ‘Enlightenment’ modernity: humanism, rationality, science, self-determination, the free market, private property, the nation state, and progress…all were felt to have failed.

We shall also attempt to understand modernism (which is not to be confused with modernity) in relation to processes of socioeconomic progress at the turn of the twentieth century. Modernisation – with its massive technological advances, industrial upheavals, as well as the vast urban expansions and mass movements within nation-states – left its mark on the visions and values of the time, visions that have come to be loosely grouped together under the name ‘modernism’.

While celebrating the impact on contemporary life of modernization – the sense of enlargement and exhilaration, the seemingly endless potential for material development and improvability – modernist thinkers at the same time drew attention to the price paid for machine-built civilisation: a brutally alienated and atomised society, profound individual disorientation and insecurity. In attempting to respond to the rapid rhythm of material change, including its social chaos and moral crisis, writers began to experiment boldly with language as maker of reality. This ‘Revolution of the Word’ prompts important questions about the nature of language – its psychology, its metaphorical significance – in its relation to the external world. Is the modernist concern with innovatory modes of aesthetic expression (e.g. complex, often disjunctive narrative structures, masks of ambiguity, symbols of the unconscious) a daring and imaginative ‘ordering’ of experience or an aggravation of moral and societal uncertainty? Is the modernist crisis of language a reflection of social crisis, and if so, is the modernist sense of experimentation an inevitable and legitimate cultural pursuit? Paradox became a defining characteristic of modernist conduct and art.

Through important modernist short stories, novels and poems – by Kafka, Woolf, Faulkner and Eliot – we are going to analyse the modernist dynamic of aesthetic renewal within the anxieties of social change. Throughout the module, students will be expected to develop their ability to read the work of established authors in a ‘writerly’ way so as to turn their reading skills towards the challenges of good writing. The written tasks include the academic essay, as well as creative writing in the genre of poetry.