MODERNISMS SEMINAR SCHEDULE, 2023/2024

ENGL60451
Course tutors: Robert Spencer (RS), Chris Vardy (CV) and Daniela Caselli (DC)

WEEK ONE (RS) Introducing modernisms

• On Blackboard: Virginia Woolf, ‘The Decay of Essay writing’; ‘Modern Fiction’; ‘Mr Bennett
and Mrs Brown’; ‘Women and Fiction’, from Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008)
• On Blackboard: Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism?’ Culture and Politics: Class,
Writing, Socialism, ed. Phil O’Brien (1987; London: Verso, 2022), pp. 203-220
• On Blackboard: Douglas Mao, ‘Introduction: The New Modernist Studies’, The New Modernist
Studies, ed. Douglas Mao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 1-22

WEEK TWO (RS) Modernism and empire: Joyce’s Ulysses

James Joyce, Ulysses (Annotated Students’ Edition) (1922; London: Penguin, 2011). We will be
focussing this week on the following episodes: ‘Telemachus’ (pp. 1-28), ‘Nestor’ (pp. 28-45) and
‘Cyclops’ (pp. 376-449)

• On Blackboard: Declan Kiberd, ‘How Ulysses Didn’t change Our Lives’ and ‘How It Might
Still Do’, from ‘Ulysses’ and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, London: Faber & Faber, 2010, pp.
315 & 16-31

WEEK THREE (RS) Modernism, gender and identity: Joyce’s Ulysses

James Joyce, Ulysses (Annotated Students’ Edition) (1922; London: Penguin, 2011). We will be
focussing this week on ‘Nausicaa’ (pp. 449-499) and ‘Circe’ (pp. 561-703)

• On Blackboard: Vicki Mahaffey, “Nausicaa”, The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses, ed. Catherine
Flynn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 473-83
• On Blackboard: Ronan Crowley, “Circe”, The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses, ed. Catherine
Flynn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 572-81
• On Blackboard: Jeri Johnson, ‘Joyce and Feminism’, The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 196-212

WEEK FOUR (DC) ‘From the only poet’: whiteness and sex work in Samuel Beckett’s
early poetry*
* N.B. some of the titles of the poetry and essays analysed use offensive language. The work,
however, critiques racism and misogyny in ways that we will explore together.

• On Blackboard: Samuel Beckett, ‘From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore’ and ‘To Be Sung
 Aloud’ in Collected Poems, ed. by Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (London, Faber & Faber, 2012).
Reproduced from Henry Crowder, Henry Music: Poems by Nancy Cunard, Harold Acton, Richard
Aldington, Walter Lowenfels, Samuel Beckett (Paris: The Hours Press, 1930)
• On Blackboard (original folio in the John Rylands): Henry Crevel, ‘The Negress in the Brothel’
in Nancy Cunard (ed), Negro Anthology (London: Wishart &Co, 1934)

WEEK FIVE (CV) Modernism, space and time: Lolly Willowes

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes (1926: Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics, 2020)

• On Blackboard: Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt, ‘Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly
Willowes’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 49:4 (2003), 449-71
• On Blackboard: Short excerpts from Gay Wachman’s Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in
the Twenties (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern
and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996)

WEEK SIX: READING WEEK

WEEK SEVEN (CV) Modernism, space and time II

• On Blackboard: selected poetry from the Harlem Renaissance

• On Blackboard: K. Merinda Simmons and James A. Crank, ‘Introduction – Coming to Terms:
Identifying Race and New Modernisms’, pp. 1-28; ‘Chapter 4: The Art of Ideology: Black
Aesthetics and Politics in Modernist Harlem’, pp. 115-148; in Race and New Modernisms
(London: Bloomsbury, 2019)

WEEK EIGHT (CV) Modernism, space and time III

Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000)

• On Blackboard: Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the
Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century’, Modernism/modernity, 13.3 (2006),
487-505
• On Blackboard: Anne Cunningham, ‘“Get on or get out”: failure and negative femininity in
Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark’, Modern Fiction Studies, 59.2 (2013), 373-394

WEEK NINE (DC) Modernism and realism I: politics and pedagogy

Winifred Holtby, South Riding: An English Landscape, with a preface by Shirley Williams, an
Introduction by Marion Shaw, and an Epitaph by Vera Brittain (1936; London: Virago, 2010)
 • On Blackboard: Natasha Peryian, ‘Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain and the Politics of Pedagogy
in South Riding, Honourable Estate, and Testament of Youth’, in The Politics of 1930s British
Literature: Education, Class, Gender (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 59–98.
• On Blackboard: Winifred Holtby, ‘What We Read and Why We Read It’, The Left Review 1:4
(January 1935), 111–114

WEEK TEN (DC) Modernism and realism II: experimentalism and sexual candour
Winifred Holtby, South Riding: An English Landscape, with a preface by Shirley Williams, an
Introduction by Marion Shaw, and an Epitaph by Vera Brittain (1936; London: Virago, 2010)

• On Blackboard: Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970).
(excerpts)
• On Blackboard: Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: a critical memoir [1932] (Chicago: Cassandra
edition, 1978) (excerpts)
• On Blackboard: Lisa Stead, ‘“The big romance”: Winifred Holtby and the Fictionalisation of
Women’s Cinemagoing in Interwar Yorkshire’, Women’s History Review, 22:5 (Spring 2013),
759-776.

WEEK ELEVEN (CV) Minimalism, abstraction and sexuality: Samuel Beckett’s Post War
Short Prose
Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. by S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press,
1995). We will focus on: All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, and Enough.

• On Blackboard: David Cunningham, ‘“We have our being in justice”: Formalism, Abstraction
and Beckett’s “Ethics”’, in Russell Smith (ed.), Beckett and Ethics (London and New York:
Continuum, 2008), pp. 21–37.
• On Blackboard: Laura Salisbury Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2012). (excerpts)

WEEK TWELVE (RS, CV and DC) Essay Writing Workshop

This session will provide a chance to discuss your essay plans with the group. We will also review the
themes and questions we have been discussing together on the course.