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This module is comprised of two halves. In the first part of the trimester students will read widely among the magazines which were a fertile breeding ground for modernism in order to understand key debates and contexts in the period. Magazines consulted will range from the socialist The New Age, keenly attentive to the ‘modern’ and world politics, via the Chicago Poetry, in which the first Imagist poems were published, to the Little Review, which at times advocated for feminism and anarchism, and was prosecuted for obscenity for its serialisation of the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In addition to these sites of literary and artistic modernism, students will be encouraged to research widely in popular and specialist periodicals as diverse as the Pall Mall Magazine, Musical News, and Vogue. The first half of the term will be organised by topic, beginning with manifestoes and definitions of modernism, modernity and the modern before going on to cover: magazines, form and aesthetics; philosophy and politics; technology, the material and the world; and global modernisms. The second half of the module picks up these themes in texts and films which exist at modernism’s margins. Popularity, canonicity, obscenity and technology are addressed in texts which may include E.M. Hull’s notorious novel The Sheik (1919) and the film adaptation starring Rudolph Valentino (dir. George Melford, 1921), D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and selections from Rabindranath Tagore. Students will continue to demonstrate their understandings of how these texts contribute to ongoing debates by situating them among contemporary discourses and assessing their reception. This will be situated among critical work that attempts to define modernism and challenges its conceptualisation by critics and theorists such as Harry Levin, Raymond Williams, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, Susan Stanford Friedman and others.

LO1: interpret a range of modernist texts, broadly conceived, in terms of style, form and medium
LO2: demonstrate a secure and nuanced understanding of the dynamic relationship between early twentieth-century intellectual currents, based on reading across a wide range of periodicals, and cultural texts
LO3: evaluate and engage with the role of periodicals and mass media in the construction of modernism
LO4: critically reflect on the development of histories and theories of modernism and modernity
LO5: demonstrate the ability to work both independently and as part of a group