Introduction

Using this subject guide

We have organised this subject guide around the structure of the examination paper. It consists of one chapter devoted to Section A of the paper, two chapters devoted to single author studies and two chapters devoted to topic studies.

This guide is not intended as a comprehensive guide to all the possibilities for study on this course. It is designed as a starting point for developing your own study plan. One way to start is to read some of the texts relevant to the subject. In conjunction with the subject guide, you may then wish to choose which texts to study in more detail. The authors and topics addressed in this guide are intended to be indicative and are not treated exhaustively. You will have to adapt the primary materials and study strategies to your own specific interest and concerns. The content of the course of study you construct will consist of both the primary texts you choose (these will include novels, poems and plays) and secondary material such as literary criticism, history, biography and so on.

This guide does not constitute the subject itself, but is a guide to how you might construct an appropriate course of study and to appropriate ways of studying the material that you choose. It also indicates the range of material that is the minimum amount necessary for you to face the examination with confidence. Simple repetition in the examination of the illustrative material in this subject guide will be regarded as plagiarism and heavily penalised. You must adapt such material in ways appropriate to your chosen syllabus of study. Examiners will always look unfavourably at examinations which are composed of answers which draw solely on the illustrative material provided in this subject guide.

You will find study strategies (e.g. consider this point, study this chapter, etc.) throughout the guide. On occasion this subject guide will respond to these study strategies. These responses are not intended as ideal answers but rather as orientation material. You are reminded of the necessity of identifying other people’s work. Plagiarising the subject guide, like plagiarising from any source, is heavily penalised by the examiners.

Each chapter starts with a suggested reading list for the topics to be covered. It is divided into essential and further reading. The former sets out the texts we discuss in the chapter. The latter list includes a number of books and articles that will enhance your knowledge and understanding of the topic.

General reading

There are few textbooks that will adequately cover the whole of this course although you may find some general histories of literature and generic studies in the Student handbook which will help. They do, however, need to be supplemented by more detailed material. Ideally we would offer booklists for each of the authors and topics listed above, but we do not have the space to do this. This means that for your study of authors and topics other than those discussed here you will need to compile your own reading lists, with the help of the handbook and bearing the following in mind.

Most libraries have computerised indexing which will cross-reference. So the entry ‘Graham Greene’, for instance, should produce lists of Greene’s writing, but also biographies, critical readings, etc.

You will know from earlier courses that the nature of English studies has changed radically over the past 40 years. Bear this in mind. If all the criticism you read on, say, Virginia Woolf was written in the 1960s, you may have a limited idea of the range of critical responses to this writer. At the same time, do not assume that criticism from an earlier date is necessarily out of date.

There are collections of essays on such subjects as modern literature and modernism in literature, and on individual writers and texts, like the Casebook series and the Cambridge Companion Guides. These will provide fast access to a range of critical views and approaches. Remember that critical texts usually contain bibliographies that will be useful to you in compiling your own reading lists.

Scholarly essays are available for free online, via the University of London’s Online Library. JSTOR is a particularly useful database, and offers most essays downloadable as pdfs. While a JSTOR search on an author or text title is likely to throw up a large range of results, a focused search on areas of interest is likely to be more productive (e.g. ‘Pound and free verse’ will be more effective than simply ‘Ezra Pound’) – although initially you might want to start with a wide search to see what comes up.

The following list is a select guide to materials on modern literary culture. None of these titles on the poetry, drama and fiction of the modern period is compulsory and none indispensable. Nor is it intended that you should read everything on this list. However, these items do address a range of important and central issues in twentieth-/twenty-first-century literature.

Recommended reading

Artaud, Antonin The Theatre and its Double. (London: Calder Press, 1968) [ISBN 0714501696]. The manifesto of the ‘theatre of cruelty’. Very influential on post-1950s theatre.

Bakhtin, Mikhail The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) [ISBN 029271534]. Bahktin has had enormous influence on narratological approaches to literature.

Baldick, Chris. The Modern Movement: 1910–1940. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [ISBN 9780199288342]. Number 10 in the Oxford English Literary History series, Baldick offers a readable survey of Eliot, Joyce and Woolf and other key figures in this readable survey.

Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976) [ISBN 9780292790407]. Important early study of British and American expatriate women writers who relocated to Paris in order to find necessary freedoms to produce modernist literature. Writers examined include Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and H.D.

Blamires, Harry Twentieth Century English Literature. (London: Macmillan, 1986) [ISBN 0333428102]. A clearly written survey. Useful introduction.

*Bradbury, M. and J. McFarlane (eds) Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930. (London: Penguin, 1991) [ISBN 014013833]. A wide-ranging selection of interesting material on the period of ‘classical’ modernism.

Brater, E. and R. Cohn (eds) Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990) [ISBN 9780472081936]. Comprehensive collection of essays on drama in the twentieth century.

*Brooker, P. (ed.) Modernism/Postmodernism. (London: Longman, 1992) [ISBN 0582063574]. Establishes the central issues and problems around defining these important terms.

Carey, John The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. (London: Faber, 1992) [ISBN 0571162738]. Fascinating account of literary elitism.

Chatman, S. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978) [ISBN 080149186X]. An interesting introduction to the study of narrative.

Childs, Peter Modernism. (London: Routledge, 2007) second edition [ISBN 9780415415460]. Accessible overview which charts modernism and postmodernism in both its global and local contexts. Useful for its active linking between key thinkers (Darwin, Marx, Freud etc) and important writers of the period.

DeKoven, Marianne Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) [ISBN 0691068690]. A post-structuralist approach to modern literature.

Elam, Keir The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. (London: Methuen, 1980) [ISBN 041720609]. An interesting approach to drama as text which argues that dramatic discourse demands a specific semiotic critical methodology.

Elliott, Bridget and Jo-Ann Wallace Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)positionings. (London: Routledge, 1994) [ISBN 9780415053662]. Interdisciplinary study, examining the links between visual and literary cultures in work by women, and the ways in which their work has been variously positioned in relation to their male counterparts.

*Faulkner, P. (ed.) A Modernist Reader: Modernism in England 1910–1930. (London: Batsford Press, 1986) [ISBN 0713451742]. A useful collection of modernist texts. This should help you to engage with some of the central characteristics of modernism.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic. (Gordon and Breach Science Publishers 1986) [ISBN 9780677215808]. Feminist examination of modernist aesthetics by seminal feminist critics Gilbert and Gubar.

*Gross, John (ed.) The Modern Movement. (London: Times Literary Supplement, 1992) [ISBN 002726734]. A collection of articles and reviews originally published in the Times Literary Supplement.

*Levenson, Michael (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) [ISBN 0521495164]. A wide-ranging collection of essays, involved in ‘rescuing’ the idea of modernism.

Levenson, Michael A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780521338004]. Exploration of the development of literary modernism, with reference to shifting ideologies, philosophy, cultural practices and literary theory. Well-regarded as a critical introduction.

Hanscombe, Gillian E. and Virginia L. Smyers. Writing for Their Lives: The Modernist Women 1910–1940. (London: Women’s Press, 1987). [ISBN 9780704340756]. Particularly useful for feminist approaches to modernism.

Kermode, F. Modern Essays. (London: Fontana, 1990) new edition. [ISBN 9780006862062]. Collection of short pieces by this well-known critic on a variety of modern writers and modern issues.

Krauss, Rosalind. E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) [ISBN 9780262610469]. Thought-provoking consideration of the origins of postmodernism in art, with specific reference to structuralism/poststructuralism. Of interest to those students interested in the links between writing and visual culture (especially painting and sculpture).

McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction. (London: Routledge, 1989) [ISBN 0145045134]. A lively attempt at constructing the character of a postmodern fiction.

Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) [ISBN 9780520216488]. Ground-breaking challenge to the standard periodisation of modernism as a 1900-1930 aesthetic practice, exploring the ways in which key writers such as Samuel Beckett, Mina Loy and Wyndham Lewis responded to earlier modernism with a ‘late modernism’ of their own.

Mellors, Anthony. Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) [ISBN 9780719058851]. Following Miller’s lead in Late Modernism, Mellors focuses on poetry, particularly the ways in which later poets responded to the poetic practices and aesthetics laid down by Ezra Pound, for example, in the first ‘modernist’ revolution, examining ‘late modernist poetics’ as they extend into poetry of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

Nicholls, Peter Modernisms: A Literary Guide. (London: Macmillan, 1995) [ISBN 0333407385]. A guide to the variety of European ‘modernisms’ in the early modern period. Particularly useful on the early European origins of modernism.

North, Michael The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth Century Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) [ISBN 0195122917]. Focuses on issues of race and language in ‘transatlantic’ modernism.

*Pound, Ezra The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Edited and with an introduction by T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1974) [ISBN 0571057055]. Essays and reviews from the ‘classical’ period of modernism.

*Pykett, Lynn Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century. (London: Edward Arnold, 1995) [ISBN 03405627]. Places gender issues at the centre of formulations of the modern in the early twentieth century.

*Roberts, M. (ed.) The Faber Book of Modern Verse. (London: Faber, 1982) [ISBN 0571180558]. A standard collection of modern poetry.

Scott, Bonnie Kime (ed.) The Gender of Modernism. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) [ISBN 0253351227]. A useful collection of materials, mostly from women writers of the modern period.

Thwaite, A. Poetry Today: A Critical Guide to British Poetry, 1960–1984. (Harlow: Longman Press, 1985) [ISBN 0582494192]. A survey of British poetry in a later part of period.

Timms, Edward and Peter Collier. Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). [ISBN 9780719022616]. Of interest to students looking to examine the links between literature and politics, particularly the avant-garde.

Trotter, David The English Novel in History, 1895–1920. (London: Routledge, 1993) [ISBN 0415015014].

*Stevenson, R. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1992) [ISBN 0745013023]. A lively and wide-ranging account of the modern novel.

Waugh, P. Postmodernism: A Reader. (London: Arnold Press, 1992) [ISBN 0340573805]. Discusses the character of postmodernism, and some of the key issues around defining the postmodern.

Wheeler, Kathleen. ‘Modernist’ Women Writers and Narrative Art. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994) [ISBN 9780333617328]. Examination of women fiction writers within modern culture, including Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield.

Williams, Raymond The Politics of Modernism. (London: Verso, 1989) [ISBN 0860912418]. An interesting account of how formulations of modernism have implicated political positions.

* Especially recommended

Subject content

You should organise your course of study around both topics and individual authors. The kind of topics you might choose to investigate could include:

In practice, some of these topics (science fiction and feminist fiction for instance) may well overlap. The following is a list of authors whose works you may choose to study.

* Particularly recommended

You need not feel restricted by these lists of topics and authors and you are not expected to know all these figures and topics in depth. But you are advised to study the work of some of the ‘classical’ modernists, in addition to postmodernist and contemporary writing, and to strike a balance between poetry, drama and prose. These classical modernist writers, marked above with an asterisk (*), are generally of the earlier part of the period. The work of the classical modernists marked a decisive break with the traditions of the nineteenth century and is central to our understanding of the term ‘modernism’. Studying the plays, novels and poetry of some of these writers will certainly help with your preparation for Section B and Section C of the examination paper. It may also help with Section A questions, although passages in this section could be drawn from any modern or contemporary text. Similarly, the list of topics includes some of the central themes, genres and approaches to the literature of this period. However, it is quite acceptable for you to include the study of topics not referred to here in your course of study.

When choosing your texts, whether for author or topic study, please remember the golden rule: do not use the same material in more than one part of this examination or in any other examination.

Suggested study syllabus with reading suggestions and sample questions

The following is a sample 22-week outline to give you an idea of how a syllabus could be constructed for this subject. It is accompanied by reading suggestions and sample essay questions.

References to Sections A, B and C of the examination paper are explained in ‘Method of assessment’ below.

Important: Ensure that you devote sufficient time to practise Section A questions. In the scheme below you are advised to practise Section A questions during each study block after Week 2.

Weeks 1–2

Content

Background reading on twentieth/twenty-first-century history and critical approaches to defining the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’.

Reading suggestions

See ‘General subject reading’ below. More specifically consult Peter P. Brooker (ed.) Modernism/Postmodernism for this part of the course.

Sample questions

You are not advised to begin writing formal responses to essay questions at this very early stage of the course. A more appropriate strategy might be to keep a diary in which you record your impressions of key issues, central areas, questions you want to follow up and so on. The following are some issues you might want to consider:

Weeks 3–5

Content

Author study: Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves). See Chapter 2.

Practise Section A questions.

Reading suggestions

See Chapter 2.

Sample examination questions

See Chapter 2.

Weeks 6–7

Content

Topic study: myth and modern poetry (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Ted Hughes, Crow). See Chapter 4.

Practise Section A questions.

Reading suggestions

See Chapter 4.

Sample examination questions

See Chapter 4.

Weeks 8–9

Content

Author study: Harold Pinter (The Caretaker and The Birthday Party). See Chapter 3.

Practise Section A questions.

Reading suggestions

See Chapter 3.

Sample examination questions

See Chapter 3.

Weeks 10–12

Content

Topic study: Modern Caribbean Literature (Paula Burnett, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse and Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance). See Chapter 5.

Practise Section A questions.

Reading suggestions

See Chapter 5.

Sample examination questions

See Chapter 5.

Weeks 13–14

Content

Author study: J.G. Farrell.

Practise Section A questions.

Reading suggestions

Binns, R. J.G. Farrell. (London: Methuen, 1986) [ISBN 0416403204].

Connor, Steven The English Novel in History 1950–1995. (London: Routledge, 1996) [ISBN 04507231X].

Farrell, J.G. Troubles. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) [ISBN 0140039732].

Farrell, J.G. The Siege of Krishnapur. (London: Fontana, 1985) [ISBN 000 65441178].

Stevenson, Randall. The British Novel since the Thirties: An Introduction. (London: Batsford, 1986) [ISBN 0713446641].

Sample questions

1. Examine how Farrell responds to the idea of tradition.

2. Critically assess how Farrell has constructed racial identity.

3. ‘Children, you are right. There are times when we have to disentangle history from fairytale’ (from Graham Swift, Waterland). Consider this comment with reference to the work of J.G. Farrell.

4. ‘The only reason to dredge up the past is to reread it in terms of current knowledges and experiences.’ Discuss this comment with reference to the work of J.G. Farrell.

5. Consider how the narrative techniques of any one writer of the period has been influenced by one of the following: the gothic; the romantic; melodrama; soap opera; newspaper culture.

Weeks 15–16

Content

Topic study: magic realism.

Practise Section A questions.

Reading suggestions

Brennan, Timothy Salman Rushdie and the Third World. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) [ISBN 0333521609].

Carter, Angela Nights at the Circus. (London: Pan, 1985) [ISBN 0330288369].

Durix, Jean Pierre Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourses: Deconstructing Magic Realism. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) [ISBN 0333733243].

Rushdie, Salman Midnight’s Children. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981) [ISBN 022401823X].

Sage, Lorna (ed.) Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. (London: Virago, 1994) [ISBN 1853817600].

Zamora, Louis Parkinson and Faris, Wendy B. (eds) Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community. (Durham, NY: Duke University Press, 1995) [ISBN 0822316404].

Sample questions

1. ‘We have got clean out of history’ (Wyndham Lewis). Analyse the attempt to escape from history in the work of Rushdie and Carter.

2. ‘Writing is clearly practical knowledge within the imaginary, a technique of fantasy. As such it is always simulated and mimicked’ (Julia Kristeva). Discuss the role of simulation or mimicry in the work Rushdie and Carter.

3. Analyse the uses made of one of the following in the work of Rushdie and Carter: pastiche; parody; satire; intertextuality; fantasy; allegory; fairy tale; mythology.

4. ‘They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment.’ Consider the purposes of astonishment in the work of magic realists.

5. Discuss the roles of games and playing in the work of Rushdie and Carter.

Weeks 17–18

Content

A review of key critical debates concerning approaches to ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’.

Practise Section A questions.

Reading suggestions

See ‘General reading’.

Sample examination questions

(From both Sections B (author) and C (topic) of the examination paper.)

1. ‘One characteristic of works we call modern is that…they claim modernity; they profess modernism.’ Discuss this statement with reference to the work of any one modern or ‘postmodern’ writer.

2. ‘There is plainly more than one modernism and not all modernisms are equal.’ Discuss with reference to the work of any two writers of the period.

3. ‘Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible’ (Jean Baudrillard). Consider this statement with reference to the work of any one writer of the period.

4. Consider how any two modern writers have responded to mass culture in their work.

5. Assess the ways in which any one writer of the period protests against modernity.

Weeks 19–22

Revision

1. Go over the work you have done for at least two authors and at least two topics and practise some Section A questions. This is the absolute minimum amount of preparation you need to do in order to face the examination with confidence.

2. Make sure that you can comfortably answer the questions raised in Weeks 1–2 and 17–18 of this course.

3. Set yourself some questions from previous years’ examination papers (available on the virtual learning environment (VLE)) and answer these, strictly observing a one-hour time limit for each answer.

Online resources

Please note that additional study resources may be available to you for this course. A particularly important resource is the VLE for the English programme, which you can access via the Student Portal – see the Student handbook for details of how to log in.

Method of assessment

Important: the information and advice given here are based on the examination structure used at the time this guide was written. Please note that subject guides may be used for several years. Because of this we strongly advise you to always check both the current Regulations for relevant information about the examination, and the VLE where you should be advised of any forthcoming changes. You should also carefully check the rubric/instructions on the paper you actually sit and follow those instructions.

You will be assessed by one three-hour examination. The examination paper will be in three parts. You will have to answer one question from each section.

Section A will consist of a series of short extracts from a range of writers in the modern period. You will be asked to comment on one of these extracts, showing in what ways it is typical of modern writing.

Section B will contain questions on either individual texts or, more usually, individual authors. In preparing for this section you must study at least two of your chosen author’s works.

Section C will contain questions inviting comparison between at least two texts by different authors in terms of specific themes, forms or critical approaches.

As well as instructing you to answer three questions, one from each section, the rubric states: ‘Candidates may NOT discuss the same text in more than one answer, in this examination or any other examination.’

This subject guide will be organised around the structure of the examination paper. You will find examples of the kinds of question you can expect in the examination as you work through the guide and a sample examination paper and report are provided at the end.

Remember, it is important to check the VLE for:

Examination technique

If you have followed the instructions offered in the subject guide, read as much of the suggested syllabus as possible and engaged with the topics under consideration, you should be well prepared for the examination. However, in order to do justice to yourself and the subject on the day of the examination, it is useful to think about your examination technique. Certain basic procedures should be followed:

These routines and strategies may seem obvious but are essential for a good examination performance.

Choosing the question

One of the most important examination techniques is the ability to choose the kind of question that you are well equipped to answer, that will enable you to demonstrate the particular knowledge and skills you have acquired during your course of study. For instance, if a question asks you to consider modern writing in relation to twentieth-century politics – fascism, for example, or communism – you will need a sophisticated framework of historical knowledge to answer this question adequately. You will need to know about the nature of these political ideologies, how they developed and how writers, both in their writing and in their wider lives, responded to them. It would also help to know how the works of writers, or groups of writers, have been theorised politically by influential critics and/or schools of criticism. The latter may be a complex business, involving quite contradictory responses, where writers and their texts can appear both ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’, for example.

It is important, then, that you have knowledge and argument at your disposal and that this guides your choice of question. Do not oversimplify and, above all, ensure that you do present a case. There are few, if any, marks available in this examination for ‘telling the story’, either of a narrative or a life. You are expected to deploy your knowledge in argument and analysis.

Reading the question

In order to answer effectively, it is important to understand what you are being asked to do, to look at the terms of the question (i.e. whether you are being asked to ‘consider’, ‘discuss’, ‘define’, ‘compare’, ‘contrast’, ‘evaluate’ and so on) and make sure you do what the question asks you to do. If, for example, you are asked to consider the function of pastiche in the work of, say, two writers of the period, it is not sufficient to list illustrations of pastiche. To describe or list is not to consider purpose. Considering purpose will involve illustrating but the most important thing is to structure argument around a discussion of how pastiche might function. The word ‘consider’ implies that there will be ambiguity and complexity here, and the occasion for fine judgement. Your views will need to be argued. You might see pastiche as being characteristic of a particular kind of literary culture (the ‘postmodern’, for instance), or as being specific to individual writers or texts.

There are many ways of answering this question, depending on the texts you choose and the argument you wish to construct, but the key point to remember is that you must engage with the question asked. You should pay special attention to terms that are in quotation marks; this may signal that these terms require definition or discussion.

General matters

Selecting topics for study

In selecting topics on which to write practice essays, remember that your essay will be preparing you to answer examination questions, and therefore you should select essay topics that relate to the three sections of the final examination.

Choosing texts for essay or examination purposes

Remember that you may decide to look at a single author, to focus on a single text, or to combine several authors’ work and look at a range of texts provided that your choice of focus allows you to prepare adequately for the examination. However, if you decide to focus on a single text, it may be difficult to demonstrate the required range of understanding without referring fairly widely to other texts by that author or others. For this reason it is advisable, if taking a single text as the main focus of your work, to ensure that you also look at a number of other works as well.

Guidance on terms

Your study of Moderns is a literary study but it will also involve you in wider debates. It will, for instance, engage you in thinking about what people mean by such terms as ‘modern’, ‘modernism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodern’.

There are hugely controversial issues involved here, involving fundamental questions about the nature of society and culture and a very wide range of political, moral and philosophical positions. You are not, of course, expected to come up with answers to such questions, but you should become aware of the nature of the controversies and relate them to your own studies. If you follow the general reading guidance, your understanding of debates around ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ will develop and, indeed, become an important indicator of your engagement with the course. The following aims to assist your progress by establishing a few basic starting positions which you should aim to consider, and test, over the early weeks of your programme of study.

The references in parenthesis refer you to items on the general reading list (see above).

The ‘modern’

In everyday usage the term ‘modern’ usually carries the idea of contemporaneity. It refers to what is happening now. In the social sciences and humanities, however, the term has had a quite different meaning. Here the modern has been understood as the ‘direction’ of Western culture and society since the eighteenth century. The ‘modern’ thus becomes a shorthand term for highly complex processes – secularisation, increasing urbanisation and industrialisation, scientific ‘revolutions’, democratisation – the whole modern momentum, in fact.

Literary studies often uses the term ‘modern’ in this way. But it also historicises the modern in a different sense, understanding the modern as a specific culture of the twentieth/twenty-first centuries; and often ‘modern’ refers to writing in the early-to-mid twentieth-century. (The term ‘contemporary,’ incidentally, refers to present-day literature and/or recent literature.) Thus, in literature, the modern may be distinct from, the Victorian, for example. In sociology, however, the Victorian is often encompassed by the term ‘modern’. This ambiguity can carry over into terms like ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’.

‘Modernism’

In literary studies this term refers to the prestige culture of a brief period lasting from the late nineteenth century to the late 1920s or the early 1930s (although some would insist on a longer duration, with modernism going into the 1950s and, even, the 1960s, with the description ‘late modernism’ applied (see Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism)). However, the same term ‘late modernist’ has been recently re-vivified to describe experimental/innovative writing that has been inspired by the practices of the original ‘classic’ modernists (see Anthony Mellors’ Late Modernist Poetics). Beyond this there is very little consensus about modernism.

Critics disagree over the precise periodisation of modernism, and about the identification of its authentic practitioners (see Brooker, pp.1–13). There have been gendered versions of modernism, with some critics associating modernism with Wyndham Lewis’s autocracy, the ‘men of 1914’ (Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Lewis himself). Others have constructed a more ‘fluid’, ‘democratic’, kind of modernism, and ascribed it to such writers as Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair (see Scott, pp.1–20). There have been disputes about where modernism belongs culturally and geographically, about its characteristics, and over its political orientations (see Williams, pp.1–40). The difficulties associated with this term are now such that some critics doubt whether the idea of modernism can have any stable meaning at all (see Trotter, pp.1–15).

However contingent the idea of modernism may be it remains a much used concept. It is still used to denote a culture, or cultural practices, made up of many strands – it involves the symbolist movement, the decadents, cubism, futurism, the Dadaists, surrealism and so on. Relationships between these strands are complex and often contradictory. Indeed, contradiction, like controversy, is at the heart of modernism. Modernist writers, for example, often seem simultaneously excited and appalled by the modern city; modernism includes both the political left and the political right; modernism is as much concerned with imitation as it is with originality. You should aim at developing sophisticated responses to these complexities and difficulties.

Activity

Completing the following table might help you to map literary modernism. You could undertake a similar exercise with reference to the postmodern.

Group/movement

Key figures

Characteristic

Comments

Symbolism

Decadence

Futurism

Cubism

Expressionism

Dadaism

High modern

Surrealism

Modernity

‘Modernity’ refers to the condition of the modern. This is constructed by many writers of the ‘classical’ modern period as a condition of decline. For many writers, Conrad, James, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, Woolf (albeit to a lesser extent), Kafka, Beckett, and so on, modernity was a society in a state of terminal sickness. Here ‘civilisation’, ‘culture’, and ‘order’ were constructed as being ‘on the rocks’. Eliot’s image of modernity as a wasteland was perhaps the most influential literary formulation of this kind.

For some critics this exposure of the modern condition has indicated the heroic disposition of the artist, fearless squaring up to the ‘reality’ of things (see Brooker, pp.5–13). For others, the idea of modernity as being redundant and lifeless is a fantasy that denotes a conservative, or even reactionary, position (see Lukács in Brooker, pp.39–42). In this latter critical tradition, the modernist, far from possessing a privileged view on the decline and fall of the West, is often regarded as being out of touch with ordinary lives and the ‘real’ dynamism of popular, mass culture. Here modernism becomes an elitist culture, an assault on contemporary life undertaken by ‘superior’ identities (see Carey, especially Chapters 1–4).

Postmodernism

Undoubtedly the most complex of these four terms. As with ‘modernism’, there are many different forms of ‘postmodernism’ and very little in the way of consensus about the characteristics of the postmodern. This is a highly slippery concept, and as with ‘modernism’, there are those who dispute the reality of the postmodern condition.

In literature the postmodern is often understood as a break with modernism. This splitting off involves assaulting the old ‘reified monuments’ of the literary past and the kind of texts they produced. A postmodern literature, then, has been characterised as one which destroys distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It embraces and incorporates the ‘schlock and kitsch’ of the ‘TV series and Reader’s Digest culture’. It has no ‘message’ or metaphysics, but characteristically deploys ‘discourse’ for its own sake. The postmodern is often seen as the end of individualism. In writing terms, this implies a culture where stylistic innovation is no longer possible. Writing thus becomes is a matter of imitation and pastiche (see Jameson in Brooker, pp.163–79).

Activity

As a starting point for your understanding of ‘postmodernism’, compare Jameson’s essay in Brooker with Lyotard’s (see Brooker, pp.139–50) and then compare both with the Baudrillard piece (Jameson, pp.151–62).

How consistent are these ‘postmodernisms’? Make a list of continuities and discontinuities.