Module Tutor: Dr Mullin
Offered: Semester 1, 2008-9
Prereqisities
General requirements for MA for which registered.
Objectives
This module takes as its starting point Andreas Huyssen's contention that mass
culture is modernism's “other”. Along with several other critics,
Huyssen diagnoses at the heart of modernism a fundamental disdain for the
popular and the mass, and a concomitant retreat into an increasingly esoteric
intellectual elitism. We will examine the canonical texts of high modernism
both in the context of the wide range of popular cultural forms which proliferated
during the period, and alongside the realist texts which continued to be
written. Do the canonical texts of high modernism necessarily express the
disdain for mass culture Huyssen perceives? How do such texts compare in
this respect to the apparently more “democratic” forms of realist
writing? And, is disdain ever qualified by a modernist fascination with the
exhilarating novelty of new forms of mass culture?
Preliminary reading.
To prepare for the module it would be useful to read the asterisked text below.
It would be useful to read either, or both, of the other two in addition:
*John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the
Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)
Andreas Huyssen, After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).
Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
Texts for purchase
All ten of the primary texts listed below are available in reasonably priced
paperback editions. If you have any difficulty tracking them down in bookshops,
try Amazon, <www.amazon.co.uk>. The on-line second hand book exchange, <www.abebooks.co.uk>,
is also a useful source of cheap second hand copies. Some secondary reading
material will be supplied by the tutor.
Provisional Module outline
1) Framing the question of mass culture.
James Joyce, “Calypso”, chapter four of Ulysses (1922).
2) The Rise
of the New Journalism.
George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891).
3) Modernism and New Technologies.
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).
4) Modernism and Celebrity.
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900).
5) Education and the Masses.
E M Forster, Howards End (1910).
6) Modernism and femininity I: Working Women
in the City.
Edith Wharton, The House Of Mirth (1905).
Katherine Mansfield, “The Tiredness of Rosabel” (1908).
7) Modernism
and femininity II: Women and Consumer Culture.
James Joyce, “Nausicaa”, chapter 13 of Ulysses (1922).
8) Modernism
and Cinema.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1922).
9) Modernism and The Mob.
T S Eliot, The Wasteland (1922).
10) Modernism and Advertising.
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
Further Reading
Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993).
Michael Bell, The Context of English Literature 1900-1930 (London: Methuen,
1980).
Clive Bloom (ed.), Literature and Culture in Modern Britain Volume 1 (1900-1929)
(London: Longman, 1993).
Pierre Bordieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1992).
Peter Brooker, Modernism/ Postmodernism (London: Longman, 1992).
Christopher Butler, Early Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among
the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)
Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000).
Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern
World (London: British Film Institute, 1994). Gary Day (ed.), Literature
and Culture in Modern Britain Volume I (1900-1929) (London: Longman, 1993). Peter Faulkner
(ed.), A Modernist Reader (London: Batsford, 1986).
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1995).
Vassiliki Kolcotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds.) Modernism: An
Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).
Michael Levenson, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
John Lucas, The Radical Twenties: Writing, Politics, Culture (Nottingham: Five
Leaves, 1997)
Modernism and Modernity, journal available on-line at <muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/>.
Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995)
Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford
Univeristy Press, 1999).
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the
Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)
Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth
Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1995).
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public
Culture (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising
and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (London: Verso, 1991).
Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990)
Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1992).
Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett, Modernist Sexualities (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2001).
Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism (Montreal/London: McGill Queen’s
University Press, 1993).
Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998).
Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford:
Stanford Univeristy Press, 1995).
Teaching methods
Teaching will consist of 10 two-hour seminars.
Assessment
There will be an assessed essay of 4,000 words. Students will also be required
to write an unassessed essay of 2,000 words,
Availability
MA in Twentieth-Century Literature
As option for other MA schemes in the School of English.
As option to MA students on other Masters programmes in the University of Leeds,
subject to permission.
RULES governing all MA schemes
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