Lecturer: Dr. Jonathan McCreedy
Course Description and Aims: The aim of this course is to provide students with an introduction to the artistic period broadly titled “Modernism” at the turn of the century and beginning of the 20th century.
Lectures will focus on modernist literature written in English originating from the British Isles – for instance, by the authors James Joyce, T.S Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Stylistic experimentation and the concept of “making it new” will be of foremost importance during the study of each writer’s work.
However, this course will take continental European trends in modernism into account in relation to movements that influenced the primary authors on the course. Modernism was a phenomenon heavily centralised around Paris, which functioned as a “hub” for aesthetic experimentation in the arts. Students will be introduced to the importance of Paris in terms of its overall presence within modernism. Writers including Proust, Baudelaire and Rimbaud will receive attention as will the classical music works by Igor Stravinsky – who lived in the city for the majority of the early 20th century. Study of his works will involve biographical teaching as well as a simplified introduction to his musicological experimental techniques. To offer additional background and comparison, the compositions of his rival, “The devil of 20th century classical music”, Arnold Schoenberg will be briefly analysed. An introduction to Freud and psychoanalysis is another essential component as its concepts substantially influenced stylistic experimentation in countless European modernistic works.
Taken all together, classes will progress chronologically from modernism’s tentative beginnings in the late 1800’s through to its explosion of experimental ideas at the turn of the turn of the century, and finally to its conclusion in the 1940’s – roughly marked by the deaths of Joyce, Woolf, and W.B Yeats.
The course in conclusion aims to provide students detailed knowledge of the primary modernist trends in British prose and poetry and how to identify them for independent literary analysis. Their immersion in the topic of continental European modernism – in literature, music and psychoanalysis – is intended to inspire them to extend the boundaries of their research into foreign language and interdisciplinary territories.
- Teacher: Джонатан Маккрийди