LITERATURE 1880 TO THE PRESENT

Level 6, 30 credit module

2014-2015
Professor Anthony Mellors & Dr Derek Littlewood
[Assessment 2]
Assessment Strategy

The assessment for this module is in two parts each weighted equally at 50% as follows.

Assessment 2
Submission date: Monday 5 January 2015, 23:55
Publication of (provisional) marks and feedback: Monday 2 February 2015
Resit period:
release of semester 1 resit questions on Wednesday 6 May 2015
submission date for semester 1 resits on Wednesday 27 May 2015
At the first assessment attempt, the full range of marks is available.
At the re-assessment attempt the mark is capped. The maximum mark that can be achieved is
40%.
During the resit period, module tutors are available for tutorials during specific open door
times each week. Additionally, the school runs a resit revision programme with sessions
focused on helping you to revise and be prepared for your resit submission. Details on the
exact schedule will be published in May.

Write an essay of 3000 words on any one of the following topics. Word count does not include
quotations, notes and bibliography.
You should discuss substantially the writers and texts that are specified for this module.
Your essay should be fluently written and referenced in a scholarly manner.
The analysis of passages of longer quotation from primary texts may be central to your argument,
but otherwise paraphrase critical works rather than quote verbatim.
You should use the full range of secondary materials available; books, journal articles, material on
scholarly web sites such as Literature on Line and JSTOR.

NB: You are not permitted to write substantially on the same author you chose to write on for the
close reading exercise. This means that if you wrote on Conrad for the first assignment, you
cannot do so again. Please write the author of the extract you have already written about at the
top of your essay.

1) What case might be made for reading EITHER Hardy or Edward Thomas as Modern if not
Modernist poets?
2) Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism are imprecise if essential terms in any discussion of pre
1945 poetry and prose. To what extent can their use illuminate the work of any two texts
from this period?
3) Heart of Darkness seems primarily about the failings of European civilization rather than
about Africa. Would you agree?
4) Wallace Stevens is often characterised as an aesthete, as one withdrawn from the major
artistic and social movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Harold Bloom in
Wallace Stevens (2003). Yet the Marxist art historian, T. J. Clark selected a line from Stevens
The Auroras of Autumn as the title for his critical retrospective account of modernism;
Farewell to an Idea (1999). Critically discuss Stevenss poetry in relation to his ideas of the
imagination and the social context of his work.

5) To interpret cohesively: that seems to me to be realisms key aim. The need to give shape to
a diffuse, opaque world, to make sense of the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent, to
fix, or at least arrest for a moment, the markets chaotic flow of goods, people, and
information - that need provoked the mimetic urge. It was precisely because the world was
not stable or readily knowable that realism found its metier, its historic mission.
Andrew Lawson, Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17.
If, as Lawson argues, nineteenth century realism is a response to the experience of
modernity (all that is solid melts into air), how true to this thesis is the shift from realism to
impressionism at the end of the century? Novels you might consider in answering this
question are: Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness;
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.

6) Examine the function of myth in any two texts of the period.

7) To what extent is Women in Love a Modernist novel?

8) How far are the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen, which frequently engage with popular
forms such as the ghost story, characteristic of the Modernist short story as a form?
9) How does reading Henry Green illuminate the form and subject matter of the modern
novel?
10) To what extent does post-modernism remain a useful term in the discussion of fiction?
Illustrate with examples from two texts.
11) How far can the idea of womens voices illuminate twentieth century texts? You might
consider the form of the short story, modern classics such as Mrs Dalloway or for that
matter the voices of women in male writers such as Lawrence, or Eliot.
12) What particular qualities do you consider the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald brings
to the study of the novel as a form?
13) Primitivism is a crucial, if problematic, concept in many of the texts of this period. Examine
how any text engages with primitive culture as an alternative to European civilization.
14) How do any two texts you have studied for this module engage with war or the aftermath of
war?

15) Many writers throughout the period seem interested in depicting some essential mystery
which evades capture in words. Discuss in relation to two texts studied for this module.
16) Tom McCarthys C (2010) and David Mitchells Cloud Atlas (2004) both deal with the legacy
of the past and might be viewed as literary games with a serious intent. Discuss

17) Examine any text of your own choice published from 1880- date which is not a set text on
this course and explore how it might be mutually illuminated by comparison with one of the
set texts. Your choice should be approved by your tutor. For example Hope Mirleess poem
Paris (1920) in relation to The Waste Land.

Submission date: Monday 5 January 2015, 23:55

Publication of (provisional) marks and feedback: Monday 2 February 2015
Resit period:
release of semester 1 resit questions on Wednesday 6 May 2015
submission date for semester 1 resits on Wednesday 27 May 2015

At the first assessment attempt, the full range of marks is available.

At the re-assessment attempt the mark is capped. The maximum mark that can be achieved is 40%.

During the resit period, module tutors are available for tutorials during specific open door times
each week. Additionally, the school runs a resit revision programme with sessions focused on
helping you to revise and be prepared for your resit submission. Details on the schedule will be
published in May.

Cheating
The below information is taken from the Academic Regulations and Policies Part II, Student
Disciplinary Policy and Operating Process. According to this document, cheating includes:
Plagiarism - the submission of an item of assessment which, all or in part, contains work produced
by another person(s) in such a way that it could be assumed to be the students own work;
Collusion the improper collaboration in the production of a piece of work when that work is
submitted as entirely the work of an individual. Except where written instructions state that work for
assessment may be produced jointly and submitted as the work of more than one student, students
must not collaborate with other students to produce a piece of work jointly, copy or share another
student's work, lend their work to another student or allow another student to copy their work;
Falsification of data or artefacts i.e. the invention or changing of material to support an argument;
Duplication - the submission of a piece of work in whole or in part that has already been submitted
for assessment elsewhere, including concurrent submission.
This list is not exhaustive and cheating in assessed work may take other forms. (see the document
Academic Regulations and Policies Part II)
Work which is discovered to be the result of any of the above will be dealt with under the
University's Disciplinary Procedures, and the penalty may involve the loss of academic credits.
If you have any doubts about the extent to which you are allowed to collaborate with your
colleagues, or the conventions for acknowledging the sources you have used, you should first of all
consult module documentation and, if still unclear, your module tutor.

DGL/AM Oct 2014