LONDON & MODERNISM: ESSAY QUESTIONS (2022)<\/p>\n
This module is assessed by one essay of 5000 words (+\/- 10%), responding to one of the questions below. Your essay should refer to at least two texts (sources) – literary texts, non-fictional prose works, or visual\/filmic material \u2013 or any combination of these.<\/p>\n
If you would like to write on a primary text (novel, poem, painting, manifesto etc) that we haven\u2019t studied in class, make sure you check with your instructors first. <\/p>\n
Format is referencing is MLA<\/p>\n
The essay is due on 13:00 on Wednesday 4th May and should be submitted through Turn-it-in. <\/p>\n
The essay should demonstrate:
a clear line of argument
detailed analysis of the primary texts with quotations from them and explanations\/critical analysis from you.
a developed sense of how the texts relate to key concerns of the period <\/p>\n
engagement secondary\/critical material (academic journals, etc\u2026)
a firm structure and polished academic English. <\/p>\n
ESSAY QUESTIONS (Choose 1 to respond to):<\/p>\n
Discuss any area of London in relation to twentieth-century representations or refigurings of it. <\/p>\n
How can changes in the representation of the individual in modernist fiction and\/or visual art be seen as a response to the experience of the city in modernity?<\/p>\n
What role do time and temporality play in modernist representations of cities and urban life?<\/p>\n
Discuss the meanings and functions of the division or fragmentation of the self in modernist writing.<\/p>\n
Discuss the charge of cultural elitism regarding certain modernist representations of London life.<\/p>\n
\u2018Modernism [is] a response by artists to that \u2018disenchantment of the world\u2019 to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention. [Gabriel Josipovici] How do any of the writers or painters studied respond to such disenchantment?<\/p>\n
In the twentieth century women claimed and gained access to various public realms. How might you read womens\u2019 representations of London as a gendered space?<\/p>\n
How significant is the metropolitan element of modernism AND\/OR the avant-garde? <\/p>\n
Consider ONE of the following as shaping force upon modernism and\/or the avant-gardes: a) Technology; b) Tradition; c) Prophecy; d) Magic\/the Occult<\/p>\n
\u2018At some point during the first half of the nineteenth century an irreversible split occurred between modernity as a stage in the history of Western civilisation\u2026and modernity as an aesthetic concept.\u2019 [Matei Calinescu] Discuss the relationship between \u2018modernity\u2019 and \u2018modernism\u2019 in the light of this statement.<\/p>\n
\u2018The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous\u2019 [Baudelaire]. In the light of this statement, discuss the role played by EITHER urban life OR \u2018the marvellous\u2019 in modernist literature and theory.<\/p>\n
\u2018The linchpin of [Baudelaire\u2019s] entire theory of art is \u201cmodern beauty\u201d.\u2019 [Walter Benjamin] Where may we experience specifically modern forms of beauty in the work of any writer AND\/OR painter studied?<\/p>\n
Discuss some of the ways in which modernism reinterprets laughter AND\/OR the body.<\/p>\n
\u2018Modernism marks neither a straightforward resistance nor an outright capitulation to commodification but a momentary equivocation that incorporates elements of both in a brief, necessarily unstable synthesis\u2019 [Lawrence Rainey]. Discuss.<\/p>\n
\u2018[T]he avant-garde, despite its various and often contradictory claims, tends to be regarded as the most extreme form of artistic negativism \u2013 art itself being the first victim. As for modernism, whatever its specific meaning in different languages and for different authors, it never conveys that sense of hysterical and universal negation so characteristic of the avant-garde.\u2019 [Matei Calinescu] Do you agree with Calinescu\u2019s distinction between modernism and the avant-garde? <\/p>\n
To what extent is modernism animated by ideas of Decadence OR Bohemianism?<\/p>\n
\u2018The principle of individuality was always full of contradiction. Individuation has never really been achieved\u2019 [Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer]. Evaluate this statement with reference to modernist and\/or avant-garde writing.<\/p>\n
\u2018It is as magical experiments with words, not as artistic dabbling, that we must understand the passionate phonetic and graphical transformational games that have run through the whole literature of the avant-garde\u2019 [Walter Benjamin]. Discuss, with reference to avant-garde or modernist writing.<\/p>\n
\u2018The most influential formal impulses of canonical modernism have been strategies of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages\u2019 [Fredric Jameson]. Is there an alternative to a modernism of \u2018inwardness\u2019?<\/p>\n
\u2018I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner\u2019 [Friedrich Nietzsche]. How important to modernism is the taking of other perspectives?<\/p>\n
True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world\u2019 [Merleau-Ponty]. Does modernism share this principle?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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