Undergraduate Course: Modernism and the Market (ENLI10346)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course explores the complexities of modernist writers' engagements with the capitalist marketplace. A traditional view of modernist art understands it as antithetical to the brute, mechanical dictats of commodity culture. This course aims to qualify this position by foregrounding the ambivalence that surrounds modernist encounters with the market. Reading works by a selection of major Anglo-American novelists and poets, we will consider the mixture of horror and delight with which modernists surveyed a gleaming new landscape of consumer products and a capitalist economy violently transforming traditional ways of life; we will reflect on the ways in which modernists' anxieties and desires concerning the commodity status of their own work are internalised in their writing; and we will think through the relationship between modernism's challenge to meaning and representation and changes in the nature of money and the structure of the global economy in the early twentieth century. |
| Course description |
1. Introduction: Paul Delany, 'Who Paid for Modernism?' (1999); Jean-Joseph Goux, from The Coiners of Language (1994 [1984])
2. E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910)
3. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914) and five short reflections on money (1936)
4. Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (1918/1928)
5. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
6. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925)
7. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
8. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934)
9. Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)
10. Ezra Pound, selections from The Cantos (1929-1965); Richard Sieburth, 'In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The Poetry of Economics' (1987)
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | A MINIMUM of 4 college/university level literature courses at grade B or above (should include no more than one introductory level literature course). Related courses such as cross disciplinary, "Freshman Seminars", civilisation or creative writing classes are not considered for admission to this course.
Applicants should also note that, as with other popular courses, meeting the minimum does NOT guarantee admission. In making admissions decisions preference will be given to students who achieve above the minimum requirement with the typical visiting student admitted to this course
having four or more literature classes at grade A.
** as numbers are limited, visiting students should contact the Visiting Student Office directly for admission to this course **
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| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- understand how a selection of major Anglo-American modernist novelists and poets engaged with economic issues
- draw on relevant theoretical approaches (including Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, and the 'new economic criticism') in order to analyse the relationships between economic pressures and the forms and contents of modernist writing
- reflect on the shared status of literary language and money as symbolic systems
- interrogate the commodity status of literature in a market economy
- mount a substantial and sustained argument about the economic dimensions of modernist writing
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Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Paul Crosthwaite
Tel: (0131 6)50 3614
Email: |
Course secretary | Ms June Haigh
Tel: (0131 6)50 3620
Email: |
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