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From Modernism to the Contemporary

Module description

This module will provide you with a survey of literatures in English, from 1900 to the present, reading its focal texts in dialogue with their contemporary culture, politics, and society. It first focuses on the innovations in style and form, in prose and poetry that developed in the early years of the century. After exploring the emergence of high Modernism, the module turns to the changing cross-currents in post-war and mid-century literature, and last to the alterable understandings of modernity and identity in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary experimentation. As it traverses both canonical and marginalised literary works, this module investigates the relationships between art and identity politics, race, class and consumer culture, technology and gender, and the attempts to express conflict through literary style, literary elitism, and formal experimentalism in prose, poetry and drama.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module will introduce you to a range of literary texts from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. In so doing, it will familiarise you with dominant (and problematically dominating) literary movements and cultural tendencies as well as counter-responses to these tendencies. The module begins with an exploration of the stylistic experimentation of the modernist movement in British and American literature. It will focus on the modernist sense of social fragmentation, and the ensuing struggle to redefine the individual's position with regard to religion, myth and history, along with a range of developments in modernist studies that have sought to interrogate modernism from the perspectives of gender, race, place, class and sexuality. The second half of the module will move on to examine the impact on the later part of the twentieth century (until the present day), including postmodernist, feminist and postcolonial literatures. Particular emphasis will be placed on the fraught social contexts of such literature looking at its response to some of the central issues of late modernity and contemporary culture.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate an informed appreciation of specific modern literary texts and authors
• 2. Understand in depth key trends and shifts in twentieth- and twenty first-century thought

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Analyse texts and relate their concerns and its modes of expression to historical context
• 4. Interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Through seminar work, demonstrate communication skills, and work both individually and in groups
• 6. Through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and write clear and correct prose
• 7. Through sitting your final examination, demonstrate proficiency in the use of memory and in the development, organisation, and expression of ideas under pressure of time

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Selection of early twentieth-century poetry
• Modernism and the novel
• Modernism and drama
• Postwar fiction: Legacies, Memories, New Departures
• Late-twentieth-century and contemporary poetry
• Contemporary world literatures

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Peter Kalliney, Modernism in a Global Context (Bloomsbury, 2016)
• Elizabeth Outka, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (Columbia UP, 2020)
• Claudia Tobin, Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (Edinburgh UP, 2020)
• Merinda Simmons, Race and New Modernisms (Bloomsbury, 2019)
• Michael Levenson, Cambridge Companion to Modernism (CUP, 2011)
• Laura A. Winkiel. Modernism, race, and manifestos (CUP, 2008).
• Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton UP, 1998)
• Peter Howarth, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (CUP, 2012)
• Peter Fifield, Modernism and Physical Illness (OUP, 2020)
• Erin Fallon et al (eds), A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English (Routledge, 2001)
• Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist uses of Nature (2012)
• Jane Dowson, Women, Modernism and British Poetry: Resisting Femininity (Routledge, 2016)
• Andrew Kalaidjian, ed., Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery (CUP, 2020)
• Lara Feigal and Alexandra Harris (eds), Modernism on the Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside (Peter Lang, 2009)
• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke, 2006)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE page: https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1746 (further reading materials and resources will be made available on ELE)

Key words search

Modernism, postmodernism, contemporary literature