MODERNS 1 AUTUMN SEMINARS Seminars will take place on the following MONDAYS from 2 to 4pm: 6th Oct; 20th Oct; 10th Nov; 24th Nov Please choose your favourite THREE options and CLEARLY PRINT your name alongside your choice in order of preference on the sign-up sheets before 1pm on MONDAY 29th SEPT: eg. GERTRUDE STEIN - B, A, D. I will do my very best to get everyone into one their top three. The group allocations will be posted on the noticeboard on the afternoon of MONDAY 29th. If you have any queries, ask me, Kasia Boddy, the course convenor. I am in room 249 and my email is k.boddy@ucl.ac.uk A. The Literature of Conspiracy 1. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907) 2. G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) 3. John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915); and Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), The 39 Steps (1935) 4. Alfred Hitchcock (dir), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) (and some extracts from Fritz Lang (dir), Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) These seminars examine some of the novels and films that, in the turbulent socio-economic conditions of the early twentieth century, dramatised prevailing fears that criminal or political conspiracies might fatally undermine 'civilization'. They look at the emergence of a literature of terrorism, and in so doing hopes to explore the pre-history of some more recent films and novels on this theme. B. Two Poets: Yeats and Eliot These seminars will explore in detail the work and careers of the two most influential poets of the era. Our sessions will focus on close readings of particular poems, but also pay attention to the structure and impact of individual poetic volumes such as The Tower and Prufrock and Other Observations. We will be analysing both poets’ processes of composition, and assessing the way their work reflects the dominant political, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns of the period. C. Two Novelists: Hemingway and Fitzgerald 1. Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1922)* 2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) 3. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)* 4. F.Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934) N.B. GET A VERSION OF THE FIRST EDITION THAT BEGINS ‘On the shore of the French Riviera’. * both are included in The Essential Hemingway These seminars will focus on the best work of two of American modernism’s greatest (if very different) stylists. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were friends and rivals. We shall consider the ways the work of each speaks to that of the other, as well as exploring their treatment of the social and sexual confusions of the post-war world. D. The Everyday 1. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine 2. James Joyce, Dubliners 3. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 4. Dziga Vertov (dir) Man With a Movie Camera (Film) This seminar will focus on modern (and specifically modernist) works and the way that they engage with the idea of "everyday life." Why is the everyday so threatening during the modern period? What literary forms and stances emerged in order to deal with this strange threat?
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E. Modernist Laughter 1. Ezra Pound, Personae 2. Wyndham Lewis, ed. Blast 3. Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier 4. T.S. Eliot Collected Poems Modernist writing tends to be thought of as impenetrable, high-minded, traditionalist and, in its own way elegiacal: forever hearkening back to a 'purer' moment in culture which could potentially be salvageable for the 'vulgar' present. But while this view aptly characterizes a well-known strain of later modernism, many of its key practitioners essentially began their careers as satirists, and it was through satire and other forms of comic writing that they broke with the literary traditions of the nineteenth century and established themselves as vanguards of the ‘new’. This seminar will explore the roots of modernism with respect to satire, irony and other forms of so-called comic writing; but we will discuss at length and in detail the very nature of humour and comedy itself. What function does it serve? Can we understand it? How is it politicized? F. American Screwball Comedy (1930-1945): Explorations in a Film Genre 1. Bringing up Baby (directed by Howard Hawks, 1938). (Optional further viewing: Theodora Goes Wild, dir. Richard Boleslavski, 1936) 2. It Happened One Night (directed by Frank Capra, 1934). (Optional further viewing: Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1932) 3. My Man Godfrey (directed by Gregory La Cava, 1936). (Optional further viewing : Holiday, dir. George Cukor, 1938; Philadelphia Story, dir. Cukor, 1940) 4. Sullivan’s Travels (directed by Preston Sturges, 1941). (Optional further viewing: His Girl Friday, dir. Hawks, 1940) In this course we will screen and discuss some of the best films from the great age of American screwball comedy. Screenings of the main films will be arranged, and it may also be possible for students to borrow copies of videos and DVDs. How should we see these films in a longer history of different kinds of comedy? How do they compare, for instance, to filmic precursors in silent comedy, and theatrical precursors from Shakespeare on? How do they compare to comedy in literature of the period, by Europeans such as Arthur Schnitzler, Noel Coward, and P.G.Wodehouse, and Americans such as Ring Lardner, Anita Loos, and James Thurber? How do screwball comedies look alongside differently marketed Hollywood genres such as film noir and melodrama, especially in their sense of less than capable men and more than capable women? Should we look at them Americanly, as declarations of independence? Freudianly, as stories of civilization and its discontents? In Marxian style, as stories of the Depression, about making money and marrying money? With Stanley Cavell, as ‘comedies of remarriage’? With Maria DiBattista, as stories of ‘fast-talking dames’? In the seminars we will look for a critical vocabulary to suit these great films, one that responds to their seriousness as well as their humour. It should be fun, too. G. Classic Film: Civilization and its Discontents 1. The Invention of Cinema: Lumières & Méliès; & Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927, Germany) 2. Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936, USA) 3. Jean Renoir, The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu, 1939, France) 4. Orson Welles, Citizen Kane (1941, USA) This seminar will offer an overview, through study of a series of masterpieces, of the first 50 years of cinema – from the first Cinematograph showings by the Lumière brothers in 1895 and one of the great silent films, Metropolis, to Welles’s still-astonishing Citizen Kane in 1941. The films chosen reflect in various ways and at various angles – visionary, satirical, comic, tragic, but always politically charged – a sense of crisis in modern society, of dangerous forces at work. Metropolis is the great original science-fiction vision of the future city (and thus an analysis of the present), a magnificent, hugely influential, cinematically sophisticated dramatisation of social
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injustice. Charlie Chaplin is a set author this year: his Modern Times see his character the Tramp as a factory worker, in danger of being turned into a machine by modern industrial civilization. Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is a darkly comic ensemble milestone in film history, beautifully constructed and inexorably showing the merciless rules of what he called ‘a society dancing on a volcano’ – on the brink of war – but never losing sight of his characters’ humanity. Welles’s exhilarating, complex, funny, elegiac Citizen Kane is inexhaustibly rich. The films will all be shown on DVD before the seminars. They are also all available in the UCL library and to buy:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Early-Cinema-Primitives-AndPioneers/dp/B000A3DB6M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1221738217&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Metropolis-Masters-Cinema-AlfredAbel/dp/B0006HIPQ8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1221738158&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Charlie-Chaplin-Modern-TimesCharles/dp/B0000AISJQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1221738260&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Regle-Du-Jeu-MarcelDalio/dp/B00009KOWM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1221738065&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Citizen-Kane-OrsonWelles/dp/B0001E5TSS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1221738305&sr=1-1
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