Module Information
Course Delivery
| Delivery Type | Delivery length / details |
|---|---|
| Lecture | 20 x 1 Hour Lectures |
Assessment
| Assessment Type | Assessment length / details | Proportion |
|---|---|---|
| Semester Exam | 3 Hours Exam Paper | 50% |
| Semester Assessment | 1 x 2500 word essay submission | 50% |
| Supplementary Assessment | Resubmission of 2500 word essay Students who fail the module will be required to make good any missing assessment elements and/or resubmit any failed coursework assignments (writing on a fresh topic), and/or sit the supplementary examination paper. tudents who fail the module will be required to make good any missing assessment elements and/or resubmit any failed coursework assignments (writing on a fresh topic), and/or sit the supplementary examination paper. Resubmit failed or missing essay | 50% |
| Supplementary Exam | 3 Hours Resit Exam Resit failed or missed exam paper | 50% |
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this module students should be able to:
1. Demonstrate an understanding of the distinctive formal and linguistic innovations that characterise modernist texts.
2. Locate and discuss modernist texts in terms of their historical, social, and cultural contexts.
3. Examine the ways in which modernist writing engages with issues of class, gender, race, and/or nationality.
4. Write about challenging literary texts in a critically-focused and well-structured manner.
Aims
- To introduce students to a range of important and innovative modernist texts.
- To enable students to identify and illustrate some of the key conceptual and aesthetic features of literary modernism.
- To enhance students’ understanding of the formal and linguistic experimentation that is characteristic of modernist writing.
- To encourage students to relate modernist texts to their social, historical, and political contexts.
- To make students aware of the diversity that modernism as a literary and artistic movement comprehends.
Brief description
This module introduces students to the radical formal and linguistic experiments of literary modernism, and places those experiments in their historical, social, and cultural contexts. The focus is primarily upon the canonical texts of 'high' modernism - Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf - though students will also study proto-modernist (Conrad) and late modernist (Auden) texts. The work of other more minor or marginal figures - such as H.D., David Jones, Ford Madox Ford, and Dorothy Richardson - will be touched upon in five thematic lectures that describe the wider contexts within which the five core texts can be located. Throughout, students will be encouraged to explore the diversity of modernism as a literary-historical phenomenon, and reflect upon the influence that literary modernisms have had upon writing in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Content
Lecture 1: Introduction
Lecture 2: The contexts of modernism
Seminar: Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Week 2
Lecture 3: Conrad, Heart of Darkness 1
Lecture 4: Conrad, Heart of Darkness 2
Seminar: Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Week 3
Lecture 5: Modernist fiction
Lecture 6: Joyce, A Portrait 1
Seminar: Joyce, A Portrait
Week 4
Lecture 7: Joyce, A Portrait 2
Lecture 8: Joyce, A Portrait 3
Seminar: Joyce, A Portrait
Week 5
Lecture 9: Modernist poetry
Lecture 10: Eliot, Selected Poems 1
Seminar: Eliot, Selected Poems
Week 6
Lecture 11: Eliot, Selected Poems 2
Lecture 12: Eliot, Selected Poems 3
Seminar: Eliot, Selected Poems
Week 7
Lecture 13: Modernism and war
Lecture 14: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 1
Seminar: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Week 8
Lecture 15: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 2
Lecture 16: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 3
Seminar: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Week 9
Lecture 17: Late modernism
Lecture 18: Auden, Selected Poems 1
Seminar: Auden, Selected Poems
Week 10
Lecture 19: Auden, Selected Poems 2
Lecture 20: Assessment advice
Seminar: Auden, Selected Poems
Module Skills
| Skills Type | Skills details |
|---|---|
| Application of Number | N/A |
| Communication | Written: By developing a sustained critical argument. Oral: Through class discussion, small group exercises, and seminar presentations. [Not assessed] |
| Improving own Learning and Performance | Through independent research and reading. |
| Information Technology | By using word-processing packages; using AberLearn Blackboard and other e-resources to research and access course documents and other materials; by submitting assignments via Turnitin. |
| Personal Development and Career planning | Through increased critical self-reflection and the development of transferable, ICT, communication and research skills. |
| Problem solving | By evaluative analysis and the use of critical skills. |
| Research skills | By directed and independent research; by synthesizing information in an evaluative critical argument. |
| Subject Specific Skills | Through the reading, writing and researching skills involved in the interrogation of literary texts, and the conceptual/theoretical analysis of works of imaginative literature in relation to a range of other non-literary texts. |
| Team work | Through group work in seminars; and through preparation for paired presentations in seminars. |
Notes
This module is at CQFW Level 5