Reading Modernity

Autumn 2003

Week 2: Baudelaire's modernity: Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life'
Rachel Bowlby

A photocopy of the English translation is provided; if possible read the French original ('Le peintre de la vie moderne') as well.

Week 3: Writing the city: Flaubert, Sentimental Education
Geoff Wall

Recommended edition: Oxford World's Classics (1989), translation by Douglas Parmee.

Further Reading:

Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Many editions. Best translation in Penguin volume entitled Marx: Surveys from Exile.

Walter Benjamin. 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century'. In The Arcades Project (1939) (Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 14-26. Photocopy available.

Georg Lukács. 'The Romanticism of Disillusionment'. In Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1963), pp. 112-131. Photocopy available.

Harry Levin. 'Flaubert'. Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).

Victor Brombert. 'L'Education sentimentale: Profanation and the Permanence of Dreams.' The Novels of Flaubert: Themes and Techniques (Princeton University Press, 1966).

Julian Barnes. Flaubert's Parrot (London: Picador, 1984).

Geoffrey Wall. Flaubert: A Life (London: Faber, 2001), chapters 22 and 23.

Week 4: Gender and hermeneutics in realism: James, The Portrait of a Lady, and Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ('Dora')
Victoria Coulson

The Portrait of a Lady exists in two distinct versions: 1881 and 1908. Please make sure your edition is the 1908 version ('The New York Edition'). The 1908 edition is the most commonly printed, e.g. by Norton Critical Editions, Oxford World's Classics, and Penguin Classics.

Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ('Dora'), trans. Alix and James Strachey, appears in Volume VII of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953) and Volume 8 of the Penguin (previously Pelican) Freud Library.

Further reading:

Roland Barthes, 'The Reality Effect', in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge University Press, 1982), and in Realism, ed. Lilian R. Furst (Longman, 1992)

Adam Phillips, 'Symptoms', chapter 2 of his Terrors and Experts (Faber, 1995)

Week 5: Technology, gender, capital: T. S. Eliot, 'The Waste Land'
Lawrence Rainey

'The Waste Land' is available in several different collections of Eliot's poetry, all published by Faber and Faber: Selected Poems, Collected Poems, Complete Poems and Plays, 'The Waste Land' and Other Poems.

Supplementary reading:

Valerie Eliot (ed.), 'The Waste Land': A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (Harcourt Brace, 1971).

Cleanth Brooks, '"The Waste Land": Critique of the Myth,' in Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 136-172. Photocopy available.

Hugh Kenner, 'The Urban Apocalypse,' in A. Walton Litz (ed.), Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the 'The Waste Land' (Princeton University Press, 1973), 23-49. Carol Christ, 'Gender, Voice, and Figuration in Eliot's Early Poetry,' in Ronald Bush (ed.), T. S. Eliot: the Modernist in History (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23-37.

Week 6: Reading Week

Week 7: Saussure and the questioning of language
Derek Attridge

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin (McGraw-Hill, 1966, Fontana, 1974). Introduction, Part One, and Part Two.

Further Reading:

Jonathan Culler, Saussure (Fontana Modern Masters, 1976; revised edition, Cornell University Press, 1986)

Jacques Derrida, 'The Outside and the Inside,' Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, pp. 30-44 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). (Photocopy available.)

Derek Attridge, 'The Linguistic Model and Its Applications,' in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 58-84 (Photocopy available.)

Week 8: Modernist technique: Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Derek Attridge

Recommended edition:

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford World's Classics)

Further Reading:

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Stella McNichol (Penguin Modern Classics)

Hugh Kenner, 'The Portrait in Perspective', Dublin's Joyce (Indiana University Press, 1956; this chapter has been frequently reprinted).

Todd Avery and Patrick Brantlinger, 'Reading and Modernism,' in David Bradshaw, ed., A Concise Companion to Modernism (Blackwell, 2003).

Week 9: Modernism and post-colonialism: Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
Laura Chrisman

Recommended editions: Norton Critical Edition, ed. Robert Kimbrough, or Broadview Press edition.

Further Reading:

Chinua Achebe, 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,' in his Hopes and Impediments (Heinemann, 1990); reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition and also in Postcolonial Criticism, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert et al.

Fredric Jameson, 'Modernism and Imperialism', in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said (University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

Edward Said, 'Two Visions in Heart of Darkness', pp. 19-30 of his Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1994)

Week 10: Cinematic modernism, mass culture and utopian ideology
John David Rhodes

The following films will be screened and discussed:

Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Movie Camera (USSR, 1928)
Fritz Lang, Metropolis (Germany, 1926)
Luis Buńuel and Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (France, 1928)

Supplementary reading:

Annette Michelson, 'The Man with a Movie Camera: From Magician to Epistemologist'

Andreas Huyssen, 'The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"'

James Donald, 'Light in Dark Spaces: Cinema and the City'

André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism

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