The Enigmatic Body of ModernismModule Details

Background and Rationale

This module examines the transformative artistic movement of Modernism through the study of novels, poetry, and short fiction by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and T.S Eliot. Students will explore a range of responses to the political, cultural, and social changes that occurred at the turn of the 20th century and the formal innovations in writing pioneered by the three iconic writers. They will engage with the close study of the thematic, linguistic, and material changes that they introduced, focusing
on the ways in which these new forms of representation are at present culturally assimilated across a variety of media. Students will learn how agreement and difference in relation to issues of gender,
sex, nation, and culture informed and differentiated these writers’ narrative and poetic experimentations. The texts are situated within their historical contexts and the consideration of the intersections between modernist politics and aesthetics is encouraged. The course will thus enable students to refine their close-reading skills and develop original, independent research projects in response to their reading of the narratives. Students will also be motivated to evaluate and apply different critical models that have been produced by critics in response to the particular texts.

Learning Outcomes
On completion of this module, students will be able to:
 Demonstrate and advanced critical understanding of Joyce's Ulysses
 Demonstrate an advanced ability to understand Ulysses in the context of Literary Modernism
 Demonstrate an advanced capacity to engage with concepts such as modernism, free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, and other narrative techniques
 Demonstrate an advanced critical understanding of the historical and theoretical approaches that have been used in the analysis of Joyce's novel