Modernist and Contemporary Fiction

Autumn, 2017

814Q3A

Dear soon-to-be Modernist and Contemporary Students,

Welcome! I look forward to meeting you soon. I’ve included the module schedule with a list at the end of the texts you are required to have with you in class. Other secondary reading will be listed on the module’s study direct site from sometime in August, and there you will find lots of other useful information as well.

Pam Thurschwell

(Please contact me by email rather than my office phone number.)

This course will explore the relationship between modernist and contemporary fiction in relation to history, aesthetics and politics. We will consider the usefulness of descriptive terms such as modernism and postmodernism. We will read a range of novels which engage with issues of artistic form, subjectivity, and modernity. We’ll ask a variety of questions including: What ideas about time, history, race, aesthetics, sexuality are most urgent for modernist and contemporary writing? What versions of borrowing from the past do modernism and postmodernism employ and what purposes do these borrowings serve? How do modernist and contemporary works portray personal, communal, national, racial or mythic history, and what problems do they encounter in these portrayals? Is there what the critic Andreas Huyssen has called a ‘great divide’ between modernism and postmodernism? What attitudes to “high” and popular culture do you find in the works we are reading for this course? Are descriptive terms such as modernism and postmodernism still useful? How can we understand our current aesthetic and political situation in relation to works from the past?

You will need to have a copy of all the novels and the major works for this course. Articles, short stories, and selections from longer works will be made available online via Study Direct or by JSTOR, MLA, or other databases.

1) Introduction: What (if anything) is Modernism? T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); and critical writings on modernism

T.S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)

--- “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923)

Recommended: Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (1984) (final chapter on The Waste Land)

Maud Ellmann, “The Waste Land: a Sphinx without a Secret”, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Michael Levenson, “Novelty, Modernity, Adjacency” New Literary History 42: 4 (Autumn 2011) 663-680.

2) What (if anything) is Postmodernism?: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1939)

Recommended: Chris Hall, “‘Beyond the Hieroglyphic Streets”: Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas and the Dialectics of Reading”, Critique 33 (1991), 63-77.

3) Sex and Aesthetics I: Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903)

4) Sex and Aesthetics II: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004)

5) READING WEEK

6) Modernism, Race, Primitivism: Gertrude Stein, “Melanctha” from Three Lives, (plus selections from Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Stein’s portrait of Picasso. Readings will be on Study Direct but I highly recommend you get a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and read the whole thing.)

Michael North, “Modernism’s African Mask: The Stein-Picasso Collaboration in The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

7) Postmodernism and the Colonial Other: J.M. Coetzee, Foe (1986)

8)Waste and History:Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997) first half

9) Waste and History Continued: Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997) second half

10) Performing Character, Performing History: Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941) plus short story “The Lady in the Looking Glass” (1929) and essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1923)

11) Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

Barbara Johnson, “ ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Rapport’ in Toni Morrison’s Sula” in The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender (Harvard University Press, 1998)

Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Heaven’s Bottom: Anal Economics and the Critical Debasement of Freud in Toni Morrison’s Sula” Cultural CritiqueNo. 24 (Spring, 1993), pp. 81-118.

12) Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad(2016)

12) Review and consolidation week

Texts you will need to have with you in class, either your own copy or a library copy:

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (not required, but highly recommended)

J.M. Coetzee, Foe

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

Toni Morrison, Sula

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad