LITERATURE AND CULTURE: MODERNISM & POSTMODERNISM

2nd Year English Minors, second semester, 2016

Course Instructor: Lecturer Drago Ivana, PhD

COURSE & SEMINAR REQUIREMENTS

Attendance is not compulsory yet useful for a successful pass.
Class participation is strongly encouraged, thus resulting in bonuses which may
considerably improve your final grade.
FINAL ORAL EXAMINATION (70% of the overall grade). Would students note that the
final oral examination focuses on mandatory primary bibliography. Secondary sources
will help students develop sound critical/theoretical arguments to be mounted during their
examination, which will definitely ensure a successful pass.

SEMINAR REQUIREMENTS
Seminar participation/oral presentations/test-quiz/essays, etc. depending on the seminar
instructors choice amounts to 30% of the final grade.
Attendance is compulsory for 5 out of 7 seminars.
DO EXPECT SURPRISE QUIZZES, particularly when students do not read the seminar
bibliography. Please note that the quiz grades will be added to the final grade.

NOTE: STUDENTS WHO DO NOT GET A MINIMUM GRADE POINT AVERAGE

OF 5 FOR SEMINAR ASSIGNMENTS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SIT FOR THE
EXAM!!!

CORE READINGS

FICTION
JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness;
D. H. LAWRENCE, Women in Love;
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;
V. WOOLF, The Waves;
DAVID LODGE, Nice Work;
G. ORWELL, 1984;
J. FOWLES, The French Lieutenants Woman;
S. RUSHDIE, Midnights Children;
POETRY
W. H. AUDEN, Musee des Beaux Arts; In Memory of W.B. Yeats
W. B. YEATS, Leda and the Swan, Sailing to Byzantium, The Second Coming;
T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Waste Land (Canto I)
SEAMUS HEANEY, Punishment; The Outlaw
Ted HUGHES, The Horses, Theology, Wodwo
DRAMA
S. BECKETT, Waiting for Godot;
ESSAY
V. Woolf, Modern Fiction; T. S. Eliot, Tradition and Individual Talent
SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Students may be well served by reading the relevant chapters devoted to both the socio-historical
and intellectual background of the periods studied and the authors included in the primary
bibliography.

Robert L. Caserio, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Novel,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. (e-book format)
Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. (e-book format)
Steven Conner, Postmodernist Culture, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989. (e-book
format)

EXAM TOPICS [Please note that the following subjects mainly act as guidelines for the
preparation of the exam, helping you, at the same time, concentrate on relevant ideas extracted
from your readings and lectures as well]

Modernism periodization and characteristics, with application to two authors.

Modernist features in 20th-century poetry.
Modernist features in 20th-century novel.
The poetics of the city in 20th-century poetry and fiction.
The revaluation of myth in Modernist literature.
The meaning of Kurtzs words The horror! The horror! (Conrad, Heart of Darkness)
The relevance of psychoanalysis for 20th-century literature.
The absurd in the 20th century.
The problem of (cultural) identity in Modernist literature.
The stream-of-consciousness technique.
Crisis/stasis/ec-stasis in the Modernist novel.
Individuality in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
The rise and role of dystopias of the 20th century.
Why is Orwells 1984 a dystopia?
Characteristics of postmodernism.
Point of view in postmodern fiction.
Postmodern revisitations/reconfigurations of old cultural models/paradigms.
Poetry and the postmodern meaning of identity.
Colonialism vs./and post-colonialism?
Political issues in Salman Rushdies Midnights Children.
The function of memory in Rushdies Midnights Children.
Magical realism in Midnights Children.
The portrayal of the Other in postcolonial literature.

As part of the foregoing general topics for discussion, students will have to define the following
literary and cultural concepts to be discussed in class:

polyglossia, intertextuality, myth, archetype, panopticon, totalitarianism, docile body, death of

the author, collage, pastiche, parody, irony, hypotaxis, parataxis, metatext, hyphenated identity,
(post)colonialism.