2023/24 Undergraduate Module Catalogue
ENGL2090 Modern Literature
20 creditsClass Size: 121
School of English
Module manager: Tracy Hargreaves
Email: t.hargreaves@leeds.ac.uk
Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable
Year running 2023/24
This module is mutually exclusive with
| ENGL2065 | Postcolonial Literature |
Module replaces
ENGL3024 - Modern LiteratureThis module is not approved as a discovery module
Module summary
This module examines the distinctive stylistic and formal innovations in the fiction, poetry, and cinema of the early twentieth century in relation to radically changing social, historical, and global contexts. It will explore how contemporaneous innovations in the arts, new technologies, psychoanalysis shaped modern writing and new ways of understanding the self. How did the First World War influence new ways of writing and new ways of seeing a fragmenting post-war world? And how do these texts and contexts come to shape literary modernism and global modernity?Objectives
Modern Literature aims to inculcate a critical understanding of a range of literary texts and genres between 1900 and 1939 through a combination of seminar discussion, close reading and essay. The module aims to equip students with the critical skills to students to gain insights in and knowledge of• stylistic and formal developments in literature and film
• the influence of historical and cultural contexts
• engagement with relevant scholarship on modernism and modernity.
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of the module, you should be able to:
1. develop capacity for close reading, critical thinking and argument.
2. demonstrate an informed understanding of modernist texts.
3. demonstrate informed engagement with wider contexts including those relating to modernism (e.g. modernist essays and manifestos, psychoanalytic texts)
4. demonstrate an informed understanding of and engagement with wider scholarship and debates around modernism and its cultural contexts.
Skills outcomes
• Skills for effective oral and written communication.
• Capacity to analyse and critically examine diverse forms of discourse.
• Ability to acquire quantities of complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way.
• Capacity for independent thought and judgement.
• Critical reasoning.
• Research skills, including information retrieval skills, the organisation of material, and the evaluation of its importance.
• IT skills.
• Time management and organisational skills.
• Independent learning.
Syllabus
This module introduces you to the modern fiction, poetry, and cinema of the early twentieth century, a period frequently approached in relation to ideas of modernism and modernity. Modernism is distinguished by its commitment to ‘making it new’, to the radical re-evaluation and development of new cultural forms, by its exploration of new conceptions of selfhood as these emerge through psychoanalysis, and in relation to the widespread changes in modernity preceding and following the First World War. Throughout the module we will have the opportunity to consider innovations and influences in modernist styles, the impact of the cinema on literary form and technique, the self in relation to new ways of understanding sexuality and gender, the impact of new technologies and of urban and natural environments on modern human and non-human experience, the global scope of modernism in relation to the aftermath of the First World War and the emerging crisis of Empire.
Teaching methods
| Delivery type | Number | Length hours | Student hours |
| Lecture | 20 | 1.00 | 20.00 |
| Seminar | 10 | 1.00 | 10.00 |
| Private study hours | 170.00 | ||
| Total Contact hours | 30.00 | ||
| Total hours (100hr per 10 credits) | 200.00 | ||
Opportunities for Formative Feedback
Weekly seminar contributions. Feedback on assessed work.Methods of assessment
Coursework
| Assessment type | Notes | % of formal assessment |
| Essay | 1,000-word critique | 25.00 |
| Essay | 2,500-word essay | 75.00 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Coursework) | 100.00 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
Reading list
The reading list is available from the Library websiteLast updated: 13/03/2023
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