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Teaching Faculty and Contact Details

Class meeting time 18:00-21:00, Wednesdays in ADM 04-01

General Overview of the Module

Recent critical work in transcultural literary and cultural studies has moved away from concepts such as the postcolonial that were popular in the 1990s to a more flexible critical vocabulary, addressing questions such as globalization, subalternity, and indigeneity, and returning to topics such as religion or nationalism that it seemed postcolonial studies had left behind.

This module takes as its focus one key, contested term that has achieved widespread popularity in recent scholarship in the humanities: "modernity," and looks at it in the context of Asian literary production.

Modernity, and the related terms such as modernization and modernism are in one sense native categories. Over the last two hundred years, writers in Asia have often struggled with the question of modernity. Initially, indigenous or indigenized modernity offered a means of resisting colonialism and of asserting cultural autonomy; latterly, pan-Asian art forms have been proposed as a means of marking distinctively Asian spaces within globalization.

In another sense, however, such terms are analytical categories: people may act in ways that might be analyzed as modern, even though they do not think of themselves as such. Thinking about "modern" literary texts thus raises a series of questions for us. Did modernity begin in the "West" and then expand outwards to Asia? Or are there plural modernities? What makes a society or a person modern? Can the concept of the "modern" help us understand the rapid changes many societies have undergone in the last century, changes which seem if anything to be growing in pace? What is the role of the concept of modernity in social change, and what is the place of modern art, particularly in our case literary texts, in social transformation?

We'll examine these questions through a three-part module structure.

How the Module Works

The module will be split into three units.

In the first unit, we will read a series of critical and theoretical texts each week exploring relations between literary texts, narrative and modernity, sometimes within an Asian or a non-Western context: these will establish basic parameters for discussion.

In the second unit, we will read three fictional texts which emerge from contexts in which modernity is to some degree in crisis, and which attempt to confront this crisis by reframing and rewriting the historical past in the context of the present. While two of these texts are from Asian countries, the third is from South Africa: hence the "Other" of the module title. My intention here is to problematize a simple identification of cultural elements of the texts as "Asian": to what extent are similar cultural elements found in a non-Asian text, and to what extent, indeed, are notions of cultural traditions embodied in the text themselves products of modernity and modernization? In each case I'm also intrigued by the formal qualities of the texts: how does the form of the text, and in particular the way in which time is conceived, relate to the problems and possibilities of living in a "modern" world?

The last unit of the module brings us back to Singapore, and to a play and a collection of poems. Note that I'm not making a claim here that Singapore in some ways represents Asian modernity in totality: in many ways the city-state's experience of the modern is exceptional and anomalous. Nonetheless, Singapore, as a cultural space that we all share, provides a useful case study, and an opportunity for a final reflection on the issues raised in the course of the module.

In addition to formal classroom meetings, I'll arrange a walking tour of an older part of Singapore early in the module. The tour will give us a a sense of how the various histories of modernity embodied in the texts we study impact very directly on our contemporary apprehensions of space: perhaps even more importantly, it'll give us a chance to get to know each other informally, and thus make classroom discussion more relaxed.

Additional Resources

This module web site provides you with a lot of what you need. The other resource you need to become familiar with is the IVLE site: go to http://www.ivle.nus.edu.sg and explore until you find the module. You'll use this site to submit essays to me via the work bin in soft copy. This takes a little getting use to, but it's much better than using hard copies, if only because you don't have to read my illegible handwritten comments!!

Last updated: 14 July, 2009