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Module GENDER/MODERNITY/MODERNISM

Module code: EN6015
Credits: 15
Semester: Year-Long
Department: ENGLISH
International: No
Overview Overview
 

"After the work of Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick we have been able to locate the historical origins of our modern sex-gender system in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century. That epochal crisis of sexual and gender definition – which, among other things, bequeathed the taxonomic categories of heterosexual and homosexual to us – was just one manifestation of the crisis of capitalist modernity in an age of rapid industrialisation, imperial expansion and democratisation; a crisis that would have its most horrific outcome in the battlefields of World War One, while finding its most exciting form in those transformations in aesthetics and consciousness that we now term Modernism. As a “complex set of aesthetic practices”, Modernism was, Perry Anderson argues, “the product of a historically unstable society and an undecided epoch, in which drastically variable futures were lived as immediately possible.”
In this module we will explore the cultural relationship between innovations in literary form and style and the evolution of new forms of gendered consciousness during this period. Specifically, we will examine how these epochal cross-currents take shape in the fictional narration of masculine identity during a period marked by the transition from a hegemonic ideal of ‘manhood’ to one of ‘masculinity’.
Texts may include: Henry James, Washington Square; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, E.M. Forster, Maurice; Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier; Radclyffe Hall, ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’; James Joyce, Ulysses; Ernest Hemmingway, A Farewell to Arms; Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room; Katherine Mansfield, selected stories; David Jones, In Parenthesis.
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