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The British Novel and Modernism

Αγγλικό μυθιστόρημα και μοντερνισμός, ΛΕ 18, Z Εξάμηνο, Μάθημα Επιλογής

Modernism and the British Novel

Course Description:

The course examines modernism in British fiction (short stories and novels) through the works of E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys that span the period 1904-1934. Contesting realism and victorian conventions, the modernist novel defined the development of contemporary literature. In endorsing avant-guard tendencies and challenging social certainties, modernist authors ushered a novel, revolutionary aesthetics that attempted to embody the contradictions of culture, the anxieties of the modern subject, the feeling of alienation, decay and psychological sterility brought about by industrialisation, consumer culture, and war. How do these narratives represent the experience of the human subject—what Thomas Hardy termed “the ache of the modern”? Special attention is paid to women writers as innovators and pioneers of fiction and literary theory who helped shape modernism itself. Narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness, epiphany, fragmentation, and non-linear narration will be specifically discussed. Through their distinct stylistic experiments, modernist authors introduce a radical content and form that express and reflect the first half of the twentieth century. Novels, short stories, and theoretical essays will be critically examined in constant dialogue with the historical and socio-economic context.

Course Objectives:

The course aims at:

—discussing what informs the production of modernist fiction contextualising the text within its wider socio-economic frame. 

— thinking critically about the intersection of British literature with historical and cultural

phenomena of the first half of the twentieth century.

—examining the extent to which ‘modernist’ narratives extend and/or contest earlier ideas of realism;

—employing methodological tools to critically read theoretical essays that discuss the literary works under scrutiny, the form and content of the texts.
—exploring the twentieth century literary past of fiction.

—familiarising students with Internet resources on modernist literature and literary history.

Week by Week Syllabus

Week 1. Introduction 

Raymond Williams. “When Was Modernism?” (1987), New Left Review 175 (1989): 48-52.

Terry Eagleton. “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism.” Against the Grain. Selected Essays 1975-1985. London: Verso, 1986.

Virginia Woolf. “Modern Fiction” (1925). The Common Reader. Web.

Deborah Parsons, Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. [Excerpts in handout/pdf)

Week 2. Towards Modernism: 

E.M. Forster. “Story of a Panic.” (1904) E.M. Forster The New Collected Short Stories. Intr. P.N. Furbank. London: Sidwick & Jackson, 1985. 5-24. 

Listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZt7qYLnjxA

Read the relevant Hotems blogpost: https://hotems.enl.uoa.gr/gennaro-gennaro-e-m-forsters-hotel-homoerotica-in-ravello/

Further Reading: 

Athanasios Dimakis. “Hotel Melodrama in EM Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ and ‘The Story of the Siren. Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw (2015): 189-212.

J.H.D. Scourfield. “Classical Land/scapes: Transformative Geography in E. M. Forster’s Early Short Fiction.” Caliban 58 (2017): 185-202. https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.4797

Week 3. Masculine Modernism: 

James Joyce. “The Dead.” (1914) Dubliners. Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 175-224.

Listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9tMtsSW1HY

Watch John Huston’s 1987 film based on Joyce’s story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkos62UPwVk.

Watch the documentary Anjelica Huston on James Joyce - A Shout in the Street (BBC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJEIfJQoitE

Further Reading: 

Allen Tate. “The Dead.” Dubliners. Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 389-394.

Richard Ellmann. “The Backgrounds of ‘The Dead’.” Dubliners. Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 373-387.

Week 4. The Experiment of Length I: 

Dorothy Richardson. Deadlock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. [Chapters 1 and 2 (1-100)]

Watch “Reading Pilgrimage Together—30 June 2022—Book 6. Deadlock”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMPBHy6L3Z8

Further reading: 

Deborah Longworth. “Subject, Object, and the Nature of Reality: Metaphysics in Dorothy Richardson's Deadlock.” Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 2 (2009): 7-38.

Francesca Frigerio. “‘Imperialism Wants Imperial Women’: the Writing of History and Evolutionary Theories in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.” Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 3 (2010): 6-25.

Week 5. The Experiment of Length II:

Dorothy Richardson. Deadlock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. [Chapters III-VI -191)]

Watch “Reading Pilgrimage Together -30 June 2022- Book 6. Deadlock”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMPBHy6L3Z8

Further reading: 

Jean Radford. “From ‘Coming to terms: Dorothy Richardson, Modernism and Women.’” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. and intr. Peter Brooker. Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1992. 95-106.

Jesse Matz. “Dorothy Richardson’s Singular Modernity.” Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 1 (2008): 8–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26653356.

Week 6. The Experiment of Length III:

Dorothy Richardson. Deadlock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. [Chapters VII-XII (192-283)]

Watch “Reading Pilgrimage Together -30 June 2022- Book 6. Deadlock”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMPBHy6L3Z8

Further reading: 

Rebecca Nicholson-Weir. “Beyond Solipsism: Narrative and Consciousness in Dorothy Richardson’s Deadlock.” The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 11 (2015). https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol11_2015_nicholsonweir

Week 7. Midterm Exam (90mins). Interwar Modernism: 

Elizabeth Bowen. “Salon des Dames” (1923). The Bazaar and Other Stories. Ed. and intr. Allan Hepburn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. 29-34. 

Read the relevant Hotems blogpost: https://hotems.enl.uoa.gr/elizabeth-bowens-swiss-hotel-in-salon-des-dames-1923/

Listen to “The Long and Short: Elizabeth Bowen's short stories” by LRB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IHJq4yikiQ.

Further Reading:

Neil Corcoran. “Words in the Dark: The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945)”. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. 147-167.

Week 8. Space and Time I:

Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927. [Part 1 (1-114)

Further Reading: 

John Mepham. “Figures of Desire: Narration and Fiction in ‘To the Lighhouse.’” New Casebooks. Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Ed. Su Reid. Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1993. 33-44. 

Angeliki Spiropoulou. “Natural History and Historical Nature in To the Lighthouse and Other Fiction.” Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. Constellations with Walter Benjamin. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 96-113.

Listen to the first chapter of To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, read by Ruth Wilson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAwpgjLjEKM

Week 9.  Space and Time II: 

Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927. [Part 2+3 (115-195)]

——. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”. London: Hogarth Press, 1924.

Browse Yale’s Modernism Lab on Woolf: https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/virginia-woolf/

Further Reading:

Sarah Cole. “Modernism, Male Intimacy, and the Great War.” ELH 68. 2 (Summer 2001): 469-500. Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2001.0013

Week 10. Colonial Modernism and the female subject I

Jean Rhys. Voyage in the Dark (1934). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. [Part 1 (1-101)]

Further Reading: 

Bénédicte Corhay Ledent. “Between Conflicting Worlds: Female Exiles in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and Joan Riley's The Unbelonging.” Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English. Edited by Geoffry Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. 499–510.

Anna Snaith. “‘A Savage from the Cannibal islands.’ Jean Rhys and London.” Geographies of Modernism. Edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. 76-85.

Week 11. Colonial Modernism and the female subject II

Jean Rhys. Voyage in the Dark (1934). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. [Part 2 (103-197)]

Watch this brief video on Rhys: https://www.britannica.com/video/186465/Jean-Rhys-writing.

Further Reading:

Anne Cunningham. “‘Get on or Get Out’: Failure and Negative Femininity in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 59. 2 (2013): 373-394. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2013.0022.

Week 12:

Student Presentations

Week 13:

Student Presentations. Review of course material for the final exam.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter, and Michael William Jennings. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. “O, Prostitution, Gambling.” The Arcades Project. Harvard: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. 489-515.

Bowen, Elizabeth. “Salon des Dames”. The Bazaar and Other Stories. Ed. and intr. Allan Hepburn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. 29-34. 

Bran, Nicol. “Reading and Not Reading ‘The Man of the Crowd’: Poe, the City, and the Gothic Text”. Philological Quarterly 91.3 (2012): 465-493.

Cole, Sarah. “Modernism, Male Intimacy, and the Great War.” ELH 68. 2 (Summer 2001): 469-500. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2001.0013.

Neil Corcoran. “Words in the Dark: The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945)”. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. 147-167.

Corhay-Ledent, Bénédicte. “Between Conflicting Worlds: Female Exiles in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and Joan Riley's The Unbelonging”, Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English. Edited by Geoffry Davis, Rodopi, 1990. 499–510.

Cunningham, Anne. “'Get on or Get Out’: Failure and Negative Femininity in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 59. 2 (2013): 373-394. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2013.0022.

Dimakis, Athanasios. “Hotel Melodrama in E.M. Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ and ‘The Story of the Siren. Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw (2015): 189-212.

Ellmann, Richard. “The Backgrounds of ‘The Dead’.” Dubliners. Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 373-387.

Forster, E.M. “The Story of a Panic”. E.M. Forster The New Collected Short Stories. Into. P.N. Furbank. London: Sidwick & Jackson, 1985. 5-24.

Frigerio, Francesca. “‘Imperialism Wants Imperial Women’: the Writing of History and Evolutionary Theories in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.” Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 3 (2010): 6-25.

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Dubliners. Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 175-224.

Longworth, Deborah. “Subject, Object, and the Nature of Reality: Metaphysics in Dorothy Richardson's Deadlock.” Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 2 (2009): 7-38.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton & Company, 2010. 663-671.

Matz, Jesse. “Dorothy Richardson’s Singular Modernity.” Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 1 (2008): 8–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26653356.

Mepham, John. “Figures of Desire: Narration and Fiction in ‘To the Lighhouse.’” New Casebooks. Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Ed. Su Reid. Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1993. 33-44. 

Nicholson-Weir, Rebecca. “Beyond Solipsism: Narrative and Consciousness in Dorothy Richardson’s Deadlock.” The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 11 (2015). Web.

Radford, Jean. “From ‘Coming to terms: Dorothy Richardson, Modernism and Women.’” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. and intr. Peter Brooker. Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1992. 95-106.

Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark (1934). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020.

Richardson, Dorothy. Deadlock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921.

——. “About Punctuation.” (1924). The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. 414-418.

Said, Edward W. “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness.” Culture and Imperialism‎. London: Vintage, 1994. 19-31.

Scourfield, J.H.D. “Classical Land/scapes: Transformative Geography in E. M. Forster’s Early Short Fiction.” Caliban 58 (2017): 185-202. https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.4797

Snaith, Anna. “‘A Savage from the Cannibal islands.’ Jean Rhys and London.” Geographies of Modernism. Edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. 76-85.

Spiropoulou, Angeliki. “Natural History and Historical Nature in To the Lighthouse and Other Fiction.” Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. Constellations with Walter Benjamin. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 96-113.

Tate, Allen. “The Dead.” Dubliners. Text, Criticism, and Notes. Eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 389-394.

Williams, Raymond. “When Was Modernism?” (1987), New Left Review 175 (May/June 1989): 48-52.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (1927). Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927.

——. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” London: Hogarth Press, 1924.

General Information

All primary and secondary material will be available online through the e-class in pdf form. 

Requirements: Students are required to have read the material before each class. Active participation is both encouraged and expected. 

Assessment and Credit: The final grade will be based on the students’ performance in the midterm and final exam or the oral presentation and the final exam. Students who decide to sit the mid-term exam will be asked to answer only one question at the final exam. Students are strongly advised to work on an individual or pair presentation on any of the material that is discussed throughout the semester. This is an important part of the course and will offer as much as two (2) points towards the final grade.

Student Presentations:

In pairs or individually you can undertake a class presentation (for up to 2 extra points for

each student to be added to a passing grade from the final exam) which will develop one of the

themes discussed in class. These presentations will be scheduled for Weeks 12 and 13 and will be peer-reviewed by your classmates.

For the presentation students should

ï Discuss at least one of the primary literary texts studied. Choose a topic/theme/or a particular extract from the studied texts and draw connections to the larger context of the course.

ï Look at their notes, but not passively read the whole thing.

ï Engage in serious academic research rather than use AI sources copy-pasting randomly what they find online.

ï Make a powerpoint that includes references for all citations.

ï Prepare a 1-2 page handout in which they may include important quotations, topics covered, works consulted, and/or other relevant information.

ï Provide the instructor with a written version, which includes their main points (bullet points or notes) as well as the secondary sources they consulted and used.

Students will be assessed on extensiveness of research, use of secondary academic sources, coherence of your presentation, and manner of delivery. Topics and primary sources should be sent to the instructor beforehand for approval and to make sure your topics of choice do not overlap. 

How to Read the Texts for this Course

Read actively. Write in the margin and don't just underline, annotate. Distinguish between ideas or arguments that authors emphasise and details that you can look up later. Rather than aiming to reproduce the contents of the reading or the lecture, focus your notes on main points and key ideas or examples. Read different kinds of text differently. Secondary sources (and many tertiary sources, such as visuals or power point presentations) should be treated as pieces of academic writing. Think about what the different parts of a text can tell you: titles, subtitles, even tables of contents reveal how an author sees a subject: what it includes, when it begins, ends, etc. These are choices, not truths. Other parts of the “scholarly apparatus” (acknowledgements, footnotes, etc.) tell you about the author’s sources, which scholars they agree /disagree with, which theories or methods they use, etc. When reading critical pieces, read for the thesis: train yourself to find an author’s point rather than simply read an article. Authors may state their arguments most clearly in introductions and conclusions; the middle parts of a work tend to provide the sources, analysis and interpretation. Every author is making an argument. Even when an author does not state an obvious “thesis,” they still argue something implicitly, if only by focusing on some events, dates, figures, types of source, or themes, and leaving others out.

Primary sources (literary works) are the documents that survive from the period we are investigating. They must be read closely and with an open mind. Simply establishing what a literary work is saying often requires careful work; language, idioms, spelling, typography, and stylistic conventions all change. Tone and irony can be hard to detect. Even seemingly familiar words and phrases may not have meant then what they now do.

Look things up: Dictionaries (regular, biographical, and historical), atlases, bibliographies, encyclopaedias, and other reference works are there to help you decipher the texts.

Read “against the grain:” A source that is unhelpful or unreliable for answering one question may well be valuable for another. Beyond the literal meaning of a source lie assumptions that may be just as revealing. Most sources tell you more than they were intended to, as do their silences and omissions. Every source is biased (including the instructor): Identifying a source’s bias or mixture of biases is important, but it is only a preliminary task. To point out bias is not the same as to analyze an argument, interpret a source’s historical meaning, or assess its value as evidence for a particular question.