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