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MODERNISM

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Course Type Course Code No. Of Credits
Discipline Core NSUS1EN210 4

Course Coordinator and Team:                   SES Faculty

Email of course coordinator:                       pcbabed@aud.ac.in 

Pre-requisites:                                               No

Course Description:

This course will look at how Modernism or modernism(s) - as congress of ideas, and as a symptom and experience of modernity - grew in response and reaction to the rapid urbanization of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Zurich and New York grew in size and dominance. The course will critically discuss how the movements of arts and works of major European poets, authors, artists, performers and filmmakers during this time responded to the emerging urban modernity as it was being preserved amidst changes in the urban landscape. It will introduce the debates over territory, the breakdown of frames of reference, radical art movements, urban expansionism, a sense of alienation of the individual, wars; and finally the search for a personal space in the ruthlessly impersonalizing ecosystem of the cities.

Course Objectives:

The course will attempt to understand the ways in which literature and culture recorded self-conscious attempts to challenge forms, structures and conventions.

Course Outcomes:

  • Forming an understanding of literary modernism
  • Being able to make inter-medial connections of modernist works
  • Comprehending the role of literature and the arts in culture

Brief description of the modules:

Module 1: The Climate of Modernism

Introduction to Modernist Thought: Modernity, imperialism, industrialization and urbanism in Europe; the major movements in art and culture, major conceptual frameworks; what is Modernism?

  • Modern, modernity, Modernism(s).
  • The metropolis and the flâneur.
  • Mobility, technology, migration, multitude.
  • Inter-medial, intervisual Modernism(s).

Module 2: Poetry

This module will be an exploration of articulations of modernism in European and North American poetry from the late nineteenth century to the first three decades of the twentieth century. It will introduce the student to the cultural significance of little magazines in the propagation of modernist ideas.

  • Selected works of Baudelaire, Pessoa, Lorca, Rilke, Akhmatova, Eliot, Yeats, Pound and Mina Loy.

Module 3: Fiction

The changes in the form and content of short and long fiction will be discussed in this module. Changes in narrative style, such as the introduction of Stream of Consciousness will be discussed. The effects of the war on the human psyche will be examined and students will be introduced to concepts such as nihilism and existentialism.

  • Katherine Mansfield,“The Garden Party”
  • Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”
  • Albert Camus, The Outsider
  • Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Module 4: Theater

The deliberate shift brought about in drama to articulate modernist thought will be discussed through an essay on the theatre and by studying a play in this module.

  • Brecht Epic Theatre from “A Short Organ for the Theatre”
  • Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Module 5: Cinema

This module will engage with modernism in cinema and trace the beginnings of modernist articulation in cinema. The interlinkages between various cultural forms in the articulation of modernism will become apparent through this module.

  • Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera
  • Vittorio de Sica, Bicycle Thieves
  • Charles Chaplin, Modern Times

Assessment Plan

S.No

Assessment

Weightage

1

Mid term Examination

30%

2

Team Presentation

20%

4

Class Participation: Through the semester:

10%

3

End-Semester Examination

40%

References

  • Armstrong, Tim. “Modernity, Modernism and Time”. In Modernism: A Cultural
  • History. Polity Press, 2005.
  • Baym, Nina. “The Two Wars as Historical Markers”. In The Norton Anthology of
  • American Literature. Vol. D. W W Norton and Company, 2003.
  • Potter, Rachel. Modernist Literature. Edinburgh UP, 2012.
  • Wilson, Leigh. “Historical, Cultural and Intellectual Context”. Modernism.
  • Continuum, 2007.
  • M Bradbury and J Macfarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, Penguin,
  • 1978
  • M Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, Penguin, 1988
  • P Nichols, Modernism: A Literary Guide, University of California Press, 1995
  • Lawrence Rainey, Modernism: An Anthology, Blackwell, 2005
  • David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism, Critical Quarterly Book Series, 2007
  • P Brooker and others (ed) Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, OUP, 2010
  • M Levenson (ed)Cambridge Companion to Modernism, CUP, 2011
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