Undergraduate Course: Modernism: Text, Image, Object (ENLI10344)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course explores major works of Anglo-American literary modernism in relation to the advanced visual art of the period (including painting, collage, sculpture, photography, and installation). By approaching modernist novels and poems in this way, the course aims to: clarify students' understanding of the ways in which such texts challenge nineteenth-century conventions of meaning and representation; highlight the close connections that existed between literature and the visual arts, and between Britain, the United States, and continental Europe, during the modernist period; foreground the visual impact of typographic design in key modernist texts and the conjunction of text and image in celebrated modernist artworks; think through the idea of the 'avant-garde' and examine the distinctive features of the major avant-garde movements; and draw attention to the importance of the manifesto as a key point of contact between modernist literature and art, and an important genre in its own right. Each week, we will examine a particular modernist cultural movement via selected writings and artworks, with the emphasis on making comparisons with artistic forms in order to deepen our understanding of literary style, technique, and theme. |
| Course description |
Introduction to the course
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
Writing: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) and extracts from "Modern Fiction" (1919) and "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924)
Art: Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Vincent Van Gogh, Roger Fry
Cubism
Writing: Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909); Guillaume Apollinaire, from The Cubist Painters (1913)
Art: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris
Futurism and Dada
Writing: Mina Loy, selections from The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1997); F.T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909); Tristan Tzara, from "Dada Manifesto" (1918)
Art: Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Benedetta Cappa, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Morton Schamberg, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Ho'ch
Imagism and Vorticism
Writing: Selections from Imagist Poetry (2001) (including Richard Aldington, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound); preface to Some Imagist Poets (1915); extract from Blast (1914)
Art: Wyndham Lewis, Jessica Dismorr, Jacob Epstein, Helen Saunders, C.R.W. Nevinson, Dorothy Shakespear
Surrealism
Writing: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936); Andre Breton, from "The First Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924)
Art: Max Ernst, Salvador Dali', Leonora Carrington
Precisionism, the Stieglitz Circle, and transition
Writing: Hart Crane, The Bridge (1930); Eugene Jolas, "Suggestions for a New Magic" (1927) and "Proclamation" (1929)
Art: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keefe, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, Edward Hopper
The Harlem Renaissance
Writing: Langston Hughes, selection from Selected Poems; Alain Locke, from introduction to The New Negro (1925)
Art: Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Palmer Hayden
Abstract Expressionism and the New York School
Writing: Selections from The New York Poets: An Anthology (2004) (including John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Shuyler); James Shuyler, "Poet and Painter Overture" (1959) (available on Learn)
Art: Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Rothko
Pop and Early Postmodernism
Writing: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Richard Hamilton, "For the Finest Art, Try Pop" (1961) (available on Learn)
Art: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Pauline Boty, Richard Hamilton, Rosalyn Drexler, Eduardo Paolozzi
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
One coursework essay of 2,000 words (30%)
One final essay assessment of 3,000 words (70%) |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Understand the key ways in which literature interacted with the visual arts during the modernist period.
- Articulate the distinctive characteristics of the major modernist cultural movements.
- Compare and contrast the ways in which literature and visual art make meaning.
- Analyse the formal and thematic elements of major examples of literary modernism in relation to works of visual art.
- Mount a substantial and sustained argument about the intersections of the literary and the visual in modernist culture.
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Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Paul Crosthwaite
Tel: (0131 6)50 3614
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Hope Hamilton
Tel: (0131 6)50 4167
Email: |
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