Schedule for Seminar Discussion and Student Presentations

 Friday 10am to 1pm (with breaks) AS4/0206

Teaching format: Each week we shall meet for about 2hrs and 40 minutes: each session will consist of a short introduction to the topics and texts for the day lasting no more than 30 minutes. That will be followed by two presentation-and-discussion sessions. The idea is to give ample time for student discussions. Each such session will last 50-60 minutes, with a break after the first session. Each 50-60 min. session will comprise student presentations (each lasting 5-20 minutes) on topics like the ones listed below, which can be used directly or adapted and modified to fit student interests.
Wk	Date	Text	Topic	Presentation 1: Topics			Presentation 2: Topics
1	Fri 13 Aug		Modernism: Europe & the Americas
2	Fri 20 Aug		Colonialism: a global overview	What do you understand by ‘modern’, ‘modernist’, ‘modernism’? What was colonialism? What made it possible? How did it develop? And end?			How does ‘modern’ relate to concept, period, movement, epoch? What did colonialism do to and for the colonizer? And the colonized? How does the world still reflect its consequences?
3	Fri 27 Aug	Conrad	Modernist writing & the culture of the ‘primitive’ (Conrad)	What is ‘primitive’? How does it enter the politics of the intercultural?			What is the role of ethics and ambivalence in Conrad’s treatment of Africa? Assess Achebe on Conrad.
4	Fri 03 Sep	Kafka	Modernist writing & the culture of the ‘primitive’ (Kafka)	How does the notion of the “primitive” function in Kafka in relation to his use of allegory? What is the relation of modernism to allegory (read Walter Benjamin’s last chapter in The Origin of German Tragic Drama)			How does the notion of the “primitive” change when we move from Conrad to Kafka?
5	Fri 10 Sep		Holiday
6	Fri 17 Sep	Pound	The impact of colonialism on modernist writing and art The Great War & Modern Memory (Pound)	What are the arguments for and against treating modernism as a phenomenon confined to Europe or the West? Read Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory and summarize the significance of his arguments.			What is the type of evidence and the arguments to support the claim that modernism was thoroughly implicated in, or affected by, European colonialism?
Rec	18–26Sep
	To take place in 1-week break	Woolf, Mansfield	Modernist writing & the politics of gender (Woolf, Mansfield)	What is the role of women in Western modernism?			Compare and contrast the fictional technique of Woolf’s novel and Mansfield’s short stories.
7	Fri 01 Oct	Césaire	Modernist writing & the politics of race (Césaire)	Comment on the idea of “negritude” in relation to Frantz Fanon.		Comment on the relation between Jean-Paul Sartre (read his introduction to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth) and Fanon with reference to issues of race and identity.
8	Fri 08 Oct		E-Learning Week: At 10am I shall upload a set of exercise options that entail the use of electronic media. Each of you will use one of those options and provide a write-up related to a topic relevant to the module based on your use of electronic resources.	Each student who has signed up for the module will give an outline of his intended topic and proposed methods as well as anticipated conclusions, and indicate very specifically how electronic media and resources will play a role in this research. This will be done via IVLE.
9	Fri 15 Oct	Urbanism	Modernist writing & the culture of cities	What is the role of urbanism and the metropolis in modernist writing?		How does postcolonial urbanism relate to modernist urbanism?
10	Fri 22 Oct	Joyce	Modernism in a colonial context (Joyce)	Discuss the pros and cons for regarding the case of modern Irish history and culture as an appropriate part of postcolonial discourse.			What makes Joyce’s Portrait modernist? And postcolonial?
11	Fri 29 Oct	Modern Literature	Modernism, tradition, & the culture of the museum From ‘modern’ to ‘postmodern’; ‘colonial’ to ‘postcolonial’	Read Lionel Trilling’s "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," Beyond Culture (1965) and discuss its relevance to studying modernism in the academy. What are different ways in which modern and postmodern can be made to relate to one another? And colonial and postcolonial?			How did modernism acquire canonical status? Examine the cultural processes involved in this complex process. What sense does it make to combine postmodern and postcolonial: illustrate with reference to specific texts.
12	Fri 05 Nov
13	Fri 12 Nov	Review and Revision
	13–19 Nov	1 week
Ex	20Nov–4 Dec	25 Nov (pm)
Vacation:					Sun 5 Dec 2010 – Sun 9 Jan 2011
		Suggested Reading for Presenters in each discussion session
Fri 13 Aug		Simon Gikandi (ed.) (2006) ‘Modernism in the World’, Modernism/Modernity, 13.3 (September): 419-424.
Fri 20 Aug		Rajeev S. Patke,  “Postcolonial Cultures”. Theory Culture and Society, Special Issue: Problematizing Global Knowledge, 23.2-3 (2006): 369-372.
Fri 27 Aug		Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (eds), Prehistories of the Future : the Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (1995) GN345 Pre
Fri 03 Sep		Walter Benjamin, last chapter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928, trans. 1977)  PT671 Ben
Fri 10 Sep		Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo : Modernism and Caribbean Literature (1992)  PR9205.4 Gik 1992
Fri 17 Sep		Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)  PR478 Eur.F
Fri 01 Oct		Bonnie Kime Scott (ed), The Gender of Modernism : A Critical Anthology (1990)
Fri 08 Oct		Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1965)  DT33 Fan ;  Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1965); Toward the African revolution (1965)
Fri 22 Oct		Rajeev S. Patke,  “Benjamin's Arcades Project and the Postcolonial City.” Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes. Ed. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, Wei Wei Yeo. New York and London: Routledge, 2003, 287-302. [Also published in Diacritics 30.4 (Winter 2000): 3-14.]
Fri 29 Oct		D. Attridge and M. Howes (eds), Semicolonial Joyce (2000); Dec lan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (1997)
Fri 05 Nov		Lionel Trilling, "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," Beyond Culture (1965)  PN511 Tri
Fri 12 Nov		Simon During, "Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today", Textual Practice, 1,1 (1987): 32-47. Also: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/during.html

Suggested approaches to Module Topics: Links, Suggested questions, Lecture Notes

(will be updated regularly throughout the semester)

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