Modernist Constellations around 1922
The course will consider a cluster of modernist texts published or around the now iconic year of 1922 in which the cataclysmic repercussions of WWI came to a head in literary production. The idea is not only to read these texts: Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and extracts from Mrs Dalloway, Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”, Joyce’s “The Dead” and extracts from Ulysses in the context of modernist poetics responding to post-war estrangement in terms of dislocation in style and literary temporality, but also to examine their dialectical resonance with our estranged, dislocated past-present one hundred years later. Eliot’s The Wasteland will be read as a poetic counterpoint echoing modernist questions raised in the novels/novellas and finally we shall consider Elmear MacBride’s contemporary writing as echoing the modernist breakdown of language as a response to the catastrophe of history.
Objectives
Learning to read the Modernist text.
An understanding of Modernism in terms of a break in style which changes reading.
Situating Modernism in its historical context.
An understanding of the relationship between Modernism and other art forms of Modernity: cinema, photography, Post-Impressionism, which operate inter-medially in the text.
Students will be assigned a series of critical questions to guide their reading of each text and lead them to draw links between the set texts. They will be invited to respond to these questions in class presentations.
Bibilography
Primary texts
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, (1922), Penguin Classics.
Katherine Mansfield, “The Garden Party”, (1922), Penguin Books.
James Joyce “The Dead”, Dubliners, (1914), Penguin Classics.
James Joyce, Extracts, Ulysses, 1922 (I-V),Penguin, Modern Classics. Secondary texts
Virginia Woolf, Extract, Mrs Dalloway (1925), Penguin Classics.
TS Eliot, The Wasteland, (1922), Faber.
Contemporary echoes – Elmear MacBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, (2013), Faber.
Libraries
Practical information
