MLU
Seminar: Modernist Novels - Vertiefungsmodul - Details
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General information

Course name Seminar: Modernist Novels - Vertiefungsmodul
Course number ANG.04629.02
Semester WS 2022/23
Current number of participants 5
maximum number of participants 25
Home institute Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
First date Tuesday, 18.10.2022 14:15 - 15:45, Room: Seminarraum 23 A (Raum 2.02) [LuWu 2]
Studiengänge (für) ANG.04629.02 für LA Gym, Sek Englisch (2012+2015)/ LA Förder (Sekundar) Englisch (2012+2015) / MA Engl. Spr. u Lit 45/75 LP (2015) / MA Angloam. Lit., Spr u Kult. 120 LP (2015)
SWS 2

Module assignments

Comment/Description

In the much-admired study on modern culture, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), Marshall Berman defines modernity as the experience of incessant metamorphosis: “To be modern,” he states, “is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air” (345). Berman draws a dialectical relationship between the unfolding modernization (“progress”) of a primarily urban environment and the development of modernist art and thought. He claims that the greatest accomplishment of modernist artists was to make the vital interplay between opposing values such as permanence and perpetual change visible in their experimental work.
In this course, we will approach the daunting topic from a cultural-historical perspective before delving into examples from American modernist literature. Our starting point for the first two sessions will be Tim Armstrong’s classic study Modernism: A Cultural History (2005), which provides an excellent overview of cultural developments in ‘modern’ America (and Europe), before we will explore three significant modernist novels: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936). Our journey into American modernist fiction will address a variety of issues (with the help of theoretical approaches), including conceptions of time, the American dream, and narrative structure, initiation story, gender & performance studies, LGBT+ studies, and animal studies.

Required texts (please purchase the following books):

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, The Penguin English Library (Penguin Classics), 2018.
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Virago, 2018.
- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Faber & Faber, 2007.

Additional course material will be made available on the ILIAS platform.

Admission settings

The course is part of admission "Amerikanistik".
The following rules apply for the admission:
  • The enrolment is possible from 27.09.2022, 00:00 to 21.10.2022, 23:59.
  • A defined number of seats will be assigned to these courses.
    The seats will be assigned in order of enrolment.