University of Galway

Course Module Information

Course Modules

Semester 1 | Credits: 5

This seminar course will focus on representations of metropolitan space and experience in modernist fiction, addressing the fears and fascination that new urban spaces and behaviours provoked. In particular, we will explore the formal and stylistic techniques that modernist writers developed to capture the scale, pace and fluidity of city life as well as its psychological affects. The module will introduce students to the figure of the flâneur/flâneuse, further incorporating discussions of space, psychogeography, urban planning, spectacle, mobility, technology, gender, work culture, and surveillance. We will consider texts by writers such as Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Jean Rhys, and Eileen Chang, and will also draw on examples from poetry, film and the visual arts.

Learning Outcomes
  1. Offer an informed account of the aesthetic, social, and technological changes that accompanied the rise of the modern city
  2. Write critically about the techniques that modernist writers developed to document and represent metropolitan space and experience.
  3. Demonstrate a familiarity with critical concepts, arguments and theories relevant to the discussion of such techniques and representations.
Assessments
  • Continuous Assessment (100%)
Teachers
Reading List
  1. "The Man of the Crowd (to be circulated in class)" by Edgar Allan Poe
  2. "The Painter of Modern Life (to be circulated in class)" by Charles Baudelaire
  3. "The Metropolis and Mental Life (to be circulated in class)" by George Simmel
  4. "Paris: A Poem (to be circulated in class)" by Hope Mirlees
  5. "'The Return of the Flâneur' (1929), 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century' (1939) and 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire' (1939)" by Walter Benjamin
    Publisher: (to be circulated in class)
  6. "Manhattan Transfer" by John Dos Passos
    ISBN: 9780141184487.
    Publisher: Penguin UK
  7. "Street Haunting: A London Adventure" by Virginia Woolf
  8. "'Mannequin' (1927) - To be Circulated in Class" by Jean Rhys
  9. "Passing" by Nella Larsen
    ISBN: 9780241472712.
    Publisher: Penguin Classics
  10. "Goodbye to Berlin (1939) – Extracts to be circulated in class" by Christopher Isherwood
  11. "Mysterious Kôr" by Elizabeth Bowen
  12. "Sealed Off" by Eileen Chang
  13. "Modernism, Technology, and the Body" by Tim Armstrong
    ISBN: 9780521599979.
    Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  14. "Restless Cities" by Matthew Beaumont,Gregory Dart
    ISBN: 9781844674053.
    Publisher: Verso
  15. "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" by Marshall Berman
    ISBN: 9780140109627.
    Publisher: Penguin Group USA
  16. "Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf" by Rachel Bowlby
    ISBN: 9780748608201.
  17. "‘Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as Flâneuse’ in New Feminist Discourses" by Rachel Bowlby
    ISBN: 9780415752275.
  18. "The Blackwell City Reader" by Gary Bridge,Sophie Watson
    ISBN: 9781405189828.
    Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
  19. "Suspensions of Perception" by Jonathan Crary
    ISBN: 9780262531993.
    Publisher: MIT Press
  20. "Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord
    ISBN: 9780934868075.
  21. "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Michel de Certeau
    ISBN: 9780520271456.
    Publisher: Univ of California Press
  22. "Flaneuse" by Lauren Elkin
    ISBN: 9780099593379.
    Publisher: Vintage
  23. "The City in Literature" by Richard Lehan
    ISBN: 9780520212565.
    Publisher: Univ of California Press
  24. "Streetwalking the Metropolis" by Deborah L. Parsons
    ISBN: 9780198186830.
    Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
  25. "The Flâneur" by Keith Tester
    ISBN: 9780415089135.
    Publisher: Psychology Press
  26. "The Country and the City" by Raymond Williams
    ISBN: 9781784870829.
  27. "The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity" by Janet Wolff
    Chapters: Theory, Culture and Society 2/3 (1985), 37-46.
The above information outlines module ENG242.I: "Modernist Fiction" and is valid from 2021 onwards.
Note: Module offerings and details may be subject to change.