Becoming Modern

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  
• Convenor: Peter Fifield (subject to change)
• Tutors: Peter Fifield, Professor Joseph Brooker
• Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%) and an unassessed 2000-word critical bibliography

This module introduces you to key themes and issues that arise in early twentieth-century Anglo-American modernism. It will examine modernism through both canonical and non-canonical materials, and as such follows the new critical understandings of modernism as a multi-faceted set of movements and networks. You will gain a critical understanding of how to analyse modernist materials, with an emphasis on reading primary (literary and visual) texts alongside secondary critical and theoretical texts. In this way, you will learn how to conceptualise the relations between modernist texts and their socio-cultural and intellectual contexts.

The study skills element of the course is intended to enhance your research and writing skills and thereby increase confidence in approaching the essay assignment.

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• articulate key concepts and theories in critical analysis of modernism
• demonstrate and deploy specific knowledge of certain central intellectual and material contexts of the modernist period
• demonstrate general knowledge of modernism and modernist critical studies.