Becoming Modern: Literature and Culture 1800 to the Present

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Professor Joseph Brooker
• Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%) and an unassessed 2000-word critical bibliography

In this module, you will be introduced to a range of core theoretical, historical and cultural contexts for the study of modernity and its discontents, ranging from Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment’ in 1784, via the anxious discussion of the creative destruction of modernity in the nineteenth century and the Modernist moment, all the way to the daunting challenges to the language and framework of modernity in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. It is team taught by specialists in each area.

Indicative Syllabus

Defining the modern

• Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1983)
• Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (1784)
• Michel Foucault, Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1982)

Revolutionary time

• William Blake, America a Prophecy (1793) &  Europe a Prophecy (1794)
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Spirits of the age/Signs of the times

• William Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age (1825)
• Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829)
• John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age (1831)

Victorian modernities

• The Great Exhibition (1851)
• Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863)
• Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phyllis (1864)
• Charles Dickens, The Signalman (1866)
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space (1977)
• Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869)

Gender, the city and modernity

• Amy Levy, A London Plane-Tree and other Verse (1889)
• Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
• Arthur Symons, London Nights (1895)
• Hope Mirlees, Paris: A Poem (1920)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) + ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (1930)

Mass culture and commodification

• Michael Field, The World at Auction (1898)
• Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
• Walter Benjamin, Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935)
• Raymond Williams, ‘Culture’, from Keywords (1976)
• Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late 19^th Century France (1982)
• Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (1947)

Modernism and modernity

• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909)
• James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
• Siegfried Kracauer, Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces (1926)
• Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
• Aimé Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939)

Interrogating modernity

• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1988)
• Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991)
• Dipesh Charkrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000)
• Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (2002)
• Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options

Contemporary modernities

• Fredric Jameson, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization (2024)
• Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism and the Problem of the Present (2017)
• Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (eds), Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present (2000)
• Ali Smith, Autumn (2016)
• Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)
• Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This (2021)

By the end of the module, you will have:

• gained an understanding of the forces that informed the theorisation of modernity from the age of Enlightenment to the present day
• developed historical, cultural and theoretical languages for the study of literature and culture in context
• been provided with an introduction to the study of literature and culture to level 7 (post-graduate standards)
• access to a supportive environment for training in writing and researching at a post-graduate level.