Assignment Part One: Critical Review
1000 words
Write an analytical review of an article of your choice from Modernism/Modernity, which is available via the digital library. You should check with the module leader that your choice of article is suitable; it should be a full-length essay (approx. 6-8000 words) and not itself a review. If you write about an article that is not from Modernism/Modernity, 10 marks will be deducted. The article does not have to relate in any way to the second part of this assignment, the essay, or to the set literary texts or studied authors on the module. The review should include a summary of the argument and analysis of its content.
Rationale for assessment design:
This part of the assignment is designed to enable you to discover the broad scope of study and wide range of subjects that fall under the heading of Modernism and Modernity. It will encourage you to use journals and all library resources and in summarising an article, will enable you to practise comprehension and writing concisely, skills which are invaluable in study and the workplace.
Assignment Part Two: Critical Essay
2000 words
Answer ONE of the following with reference to at least TWO modernist texts from the module’s set text list (see the reading list: Link (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.). In this essay, through attention to both form and context of your chosen texts, you should aim to demonstrate a full understanding of Modernism and the module; it is not enough to present discussion of the individual texts alone.
“It may be possible that prose is going to take over – has, indeed, already taken over – some of the duties which were once discharged by poetry” (Virginia Woolf, ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’, reproduced in Rainey’s Modernism: An Anthology, p. 907). What are the effects of the “poeticisation of prose” in your chosen texts?
“Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small” (Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”). Discuss the implications of this statement with respect to your chosen authors.
“There is another reading of the historical situation of Modernism, however, that defines it as a specifically post-World War 1 phenomenon, that emphasized the role the war played in creating the psychology of despair in which the ensuing literary movement would ground itself” (Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, p.25-6). Do you agree with this reading?
“[C]haracters find themselves enmeshed in the vast relay systems of modern travel and communication” (Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 97). Discuss the notion or representation of “transport” in your chosen texts.
“The most important general element of the innovations in form [in modernism] is the fact of immigration to the metropolis” (Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, 45). Discuss the relationship between immigration and innovation in form with reference to your chosen texts.
In Libidinal Currents, Joseph Allen Boone argues that “the anonymity and alienation enforced by modern city life, abets the creation of a deliberately perverse narrative erotics in […] texts that seriously challenge the heterosexualizing and oedipal trajectories of traditional fiction” (29). Discuss the relationship between sexuality and the city in your chosen texts.
Race is “a productive element of British modernist form, a central organizing aesthetic category instead of merely a social problem” (Umila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination, 6). Discuss with relation to your chosen texts.
Rationale for assessment design:
This part of the assignment is designed to enable you to demonstrate your understanding of Modernism and the module. It will encourage you to combine close reading of your texts for their innovative formal qualities with wider reading about their social and historical contexts.