Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction

814Q3A
Pam Thurschwell
p.thurschwell@sussex.ac.uk
Arts B 222 Office Hours: TBA
Fridays 2-4, Fulton 209
This course will explore the terms modernism and postmodernism, and the relationship
between the two, by reading a range of novels which engage with issues of artistic form,
subjectivity, and modernity. Well ask a variety of questions including: What different ideas
about time and history do we find in modernist and postmodernist writing? What versions of
borrowing from the past do modernism and postmodernism employ and what purposes do
these borrowings serve? How do modernist and postmodernist works portray personal,
communal, national, or mythic history and what problems do they encounter in these
portrayals? Is there what the critic Andreas Huyssen has called a great divide between
modernism and postmodernism? What attitudes to high and popular culture do you find in
the works we are reading for this course? What continuities might we find between
modernism and postmodernism (if those terms are still useful)? Authors read will include
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Coe and Marilynne
Robinson.
1) 21 Sep: Introduction: What is Modernism? T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); and critical
writings on modernism
T.S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) (in Course Reader (CR)):
--- Ulysses, Order and Myth (1923) (CR)
Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) (CR)
Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (1984) (final chapter on The Waste Land)
(CR)
2) 28 Sep: What (if anything) is Postmodernism?: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
(1966)
3) 5 Oct: Duration, history, brevity in the modernist short story: James Joyce, Dubliners
(1914)
We will read a selection of stories which may include ones by Franz Kafka In the Penal
Colony, Katherine Mansfield, Bliss, Wyndham Lewis, Mary Butts, and Virginia Woolf.
James Joyce, Dubliners (OUP or Penguin edition) is the required text for this week. Other
stories will be provided.
4) 12 Oct: Modernism, play and history: Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928) and Between the
Acts (1941) and Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940)
5) 19 Oct: Language, Time and the continuous present: Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas (1933) selections from Melanctha, Composition as Explanation (1926) and
Steins portraits.
6) 26 Oct: Postcolonial time and the time of the novel: J.M. Coetzee, Foe (1986)

7) 2 Nov: Assessment Week. No class: read Underworld!

8) 9 Nov: Waste and History: Don DeLillo, Underworld (1998) and Walter Benjamin,
Theses on the Philosophy of History, especially thesis IX on the Angel of History (CR)
9) 16 Nov: Postmodern Politics: Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up! (1994) and Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society (CR)
10) 23 Nov: Womens Time: Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1980), Julia
Kristeva,WomensTime (CR) and Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (CR).
11) 30 Nov: Graphic History: Art Spiegelman, Maus (1986/1991) and Allan Moore,
Watchmen (1986)
12) 7 Dec: Facebook Time: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
Recommended Secondary Reading:
On Modernism
***Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Polity, 2005)
---Modernism, Technology and the Body (Cambridge, 1998)
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: 1890-1930 (1976)
David Bradshaw, A Concise Companion to Modernism (2003)
Peter Brooker (ed.) The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009)
Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (U of Minnesota Press, 1986)
T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999)
***Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Harvard,
1988)
--The Nets of Modernism (2010)
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Harvard, 1995)
Susan Stanford Friedman, Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of
Modern/Modernity/Modernism Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (September 2001): 493513.
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Indiana, 1986)
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidoe (eds.) Modernism: An Anthology
of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh, 1998)
***Michael Levenson (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1999)
---, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 18801922 (Cambridge, 1984)
--- The Fate of Individuality: Character and Form in the Modern English Novel (1991)
(Anything by Michael Levenson is good.)
***Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007)
***Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2nd ed. 2009)
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (Yale,
1998)
Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism: The Women of 1928 (Indiana, 1995)
Morag Shiach (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (2007)
Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Harvester, 1992)
On Postmodernism
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James Annesley, Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American
Novel (1998)
Peter Brooker, Modernism/postmodernism (1992)
***Steven Connor (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (2004)
Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary
(1997)
***Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory (2011)
Thomas Docherty, Postmodernism: a Reader (1993)
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)
Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature (1971)
Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988)
--The Politics of Postmodernism (1989)
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986)
***Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
--Postmodernism and Consumer Society in Kaplan (ed.) Postmodernism and Its Discontents
(1988) and other places
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984)
--- The Postmodern Explained (University of Minnesota Press, 1992)
Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (2005)
---- (ed.) Postmodern Debates (2001)
Stuart Sim (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (2001)
Patricia Waugh (ed.) Postmodernism: a Reader (1992)
On T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
***Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (1984) (final chapter on The Waste Land)
-----Does The Waste Land have a politics? Modernism/Modernity 6.3 (1999) 1-13.
Ronald Bush, ed, T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History
Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot
Valerie Eliot, ed, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts
***Maud Ellman, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound
--- . Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern
Tony Pinkney, Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot
On James Joyce
Derek Attridge (ed) The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge University
Press, 1990)
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago, 1983)
John Coyle (ed) Ulysses/A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man: A Readers Guide to Essential
Criticism (Icon Books, 2000)
Morris Beja (ed), Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Casebook
(London: Macmillan, 1993)
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Hugh Kenner, Dublins Joyce (Columbia University Press, 1987)
On Virginia Woolf:
Michle Barrett, Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing
***Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996)
***Rachel Bowlby, ed, Virginia Woolf
______, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (1998)
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______, Still Crazy After All These Years

***Suzanne Raitt, To the Lighthouse (1990)
Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writers Life
Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf
Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy
Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work
Makiko Minnow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject
Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism
On Between The Acts
Michele Pridmore-Brown, 1939-40: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones and Fascism PMLA
Vol 113, No. 3 (May 1998)
Virginia Woolf, Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid(1940) online at
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/#chapter28
Zwerdling, Alex. Between the Acts and the Coming of War. Virginia Woolf and the
Real World. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 302-23.
Barrett, Michle. Virginia Woolf and Pacifism. Woolf in the Real World. Ed. Karen
V. Kukil. Clemson, South Carolina: Clemson U Digital P, 2005. 37-41.
On Gertrude Stein:
Diana Souhami, Gertrude and Alice (1991)
Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of
Gertrude Stein (1978)
Susan M. Schultz, Gertrude Steins Self-Advertisement, Raritan 1992 (12:2) 71-81
Phoebe Stein Davis, Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Steins
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Twentieth Century Literature (1999) (45:1) 1845
Norman Weinstein, Gertrude Stein and the Literature of the Modern Consciousness (1970)
Kirk Cyrnutt (ed) The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (Greenwood Press, 2000)
S.C. Neuman, Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration (University of
Victoria, 1979)
Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism and the Problem of Genius (Edinburgh, 2000)
On J. M. Coetzee, Foe:
Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Dominic Head, J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Sue Kossew, Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998)
Marianna de Jong (ed.) J. M. Coetzees Foe special issue of Journal of Literary Studies 5,
Number 2, (June 1989)
On Don DeLillo, Underworld:
Other relevant novels by DeLillo: Mao II (1991), White Noise (1984), Falling Man
(2007).
***Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (in Illuminations (Schocken
Books, 1969) especially thesis IX The Angel of History
Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (Routledge, 2006) The Work of Death:
Underworld
Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillos Dialogue with Culture (2000),
Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles (eds), Critical Essays on Don
DeLillo (2000), esp. essays by Duvall, Knight and Saltzman
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Michael Wood, Post-Paranoid, London Review of Books 5 Feb 1998, p.3

Modern Fiction Studies, special issue on Underworld, 1999 Fall (45:3)
Patrick ODonnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narratives
(Duke University Press, 2000)
John Duvall, Don DeLillos Underworld (Continuum, 2002)
Jacqueline Foertsch, Ordinary Pocket Litter: Paper(s) as Dangerous Supplement in Cold
War Novels of Intrigue Contemporary Literature 48:2 (July 2007) 278-306. (available
online)
Donald H. Evans, Taking out the Trash: Don DeLillos Underworld, Liquid Modernity and
the End of Garbage, Cambridge Quarterly 35:2 (2006) 103-32. (available online)
On Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!:
Other relevant novels by Coe: The Rotters Club, The Closed Circle, The House of Sleep
***Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society in Kaplan, ed. Postmodernism
and Its Discontents (1988), also in Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1988)
(in course reader)
Pamela Thurschwell, Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe British Fiction Today
(eds.) Philip Tew and Rod Mengham (Continuum, 2006)
Rod Mengham, Fictions History, Leviathan, No. 1 (September 2001): 110-13.
Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000 (2002)
Ryan Trimm, Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe, Thatcher
and After: Margaret Thatcher and her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture , eds. Louisa
Hadley and Elizabeth Ho (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
On Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping:
***Julia Kristeva, Womens Time The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Basil Blackwell Ltd,
1986), 187-213
***Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917) in Penguin Freud Library Volume 11
On Metapsychology , Standard Edition Volume 14, 237-58.
Joan Kirkby, Is there Life after Art? The Metaphysics of Marilynne Robinsons
Housekeeping Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature (5:1) 1986 Spring, 91-109.
Maggie Galeshouse, Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinsons
Housekeeping Contemporary Literature (41:1) April 2000, 117-37.
Christine Caver, Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeepings Strange Freedoms American
Literature (68:1) March 1996, 11-37.
Sian Mile, Femme Foetal: the Construction/Destruction of Female Subjectivity in
Housekeeping Genders (8), July 1990, 129-36.
Art Spiegelman, Maus and Alan Moore, Watchmen:
General on the Graphic Novel:
Hillary Chute, Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative PMLA March 2008, Vol
123 Number 2
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993)
Spiegelman
Hamida Bosmajian, The Orphaned Voice in Art Spiegelmans Maus I and II, Literature and
Psychology 44, nos.1-2 (1998), 1-22
Thomas Docherty, Art Spiegelmans Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust, American
Literature 68, no.1 (Mar 1996), 69-84
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Jeanne C. Ewert, Readings Visual Art: Art Spiegelmans Maus, Narrative 8, no.1 (Jan
2000), 87-103
Judith L. Goldstein, Realism without a Human Face, in Margaret Cohen and Christopher
Pendergrast (eds), Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre (1995), 66-89
Marianne Hirsch, Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-memory, Discourse 15, no.2
(1992-93), 3-28
Andreas Huyssen, Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno, New German
Critique 81 (Fall 2000), 65-82
Amy Hungerford, Surviving Rego Park: Holocaust Theory from Art Spiegelman to Berel
Lang, in Hilene Flanzbaum (ed), The Americanization of the Holocaust (1999), 102-24
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998)
Alison Landsberg, America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a
Radical Politics of Empathy, New German Critique, 71 (Spring-Summer 1997), 63-86
Miles Orvell, Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus and the Contemporary Fiction
Cartoon, American Literary History 4, no.1 (Spring 1992), 110-28
Michael Rothberg, We Were Talking Jewish: Art Spiegelmans Maus as Holocaust
Production, Contemporary Literature 35, no. 4 (Winter 1994), 661-87, reprinted in
Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), ch. 5
James E. Young, The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelmans Maus and the
Afterimages of History, Critical Inquiry 24, no.3 (Spring 1998), 666-99.