ENGL46230: Writing the Body in the Long Twentieth Century

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• This module aims to:
• Introduce a broad range of literary and filmic representations of the body, affect, and the senses, from the late nineteenth-century to the contemporary, i.e. the long twentieth century, with a particular focus on the high modernist years of the 1920s-30s.
• Emphasise bodily movement and process, considering breathing, dancing, working, fighting, laughing, and more.
• Trace the complex ways in which understandings of the body are framed and transformed by the new styles and modes of representation developed across our period of study.
• Adopt a transnational, comparative approach, drawing on the New Modernist Studies, the bodily turn in modernist scholarship, transhistorical sensory studies, and the literary medical humanities.
• Examine bodies, bodily processes, and wider cultures of the body across the long twentieth century, moving between literary and filmic texts.
• Explore (optional) practical exercises, to reflect on the experiences of the reading/viewing body, and encourage attuned engagement with embodied writing.

• Content will change each year, but students can expect to engage with:
• Bodily processes including: breathing, dancing, working, fighting, laughing.
• Authors including: Thomas Mann, Richard Bruce Nugent, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Wydnham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Muriel Spark, Shola von Reinhold, and Carmen Maria Machado.
• Directors including: Leni Riefenstahl, Charles Chaplin, and Fred Niblo.
• Practical exercises including: tactile tasks influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty; pranayama (breathing) exercises; Dalcroze dance.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• On completion of this module, students will possess:
• Confidence in a range of theoretical perspectives on the literary and filmic representation of the body, as well as body cultures more widely conceived, drawing on literary medical humanities approaches, the New Modernist Studies, sensory studies, and modernist scholarship after the bodily turn.
• Familiarity with a range of markedly body-concerned texts from the long twentieth-century, i.e. the late Victorian period to the contemporary, with a focus on the high modernist years of the 1920s-30s.
• Capacities for reflection on the embodied nature of the reading experience when tackling these texts, assisted by the use of (optional) practical tasks that encourage sensory and affective attunement.
• Ability to work in an interdisciplinary, cross-modal, and comparative mode, using the human body as a means to trace connections between apparently disparate texts and processes, as well as observing changes in human understanding of our bodily lives.
• Sensitivity to technical and formal experimentation in literary and filmic contexts, understanding social and philosophical drivers behind new ways of thinking, writing, and filmmaking about the body.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• Advanced critical skills in the close reading and analysis of literary and historical texts;
• An ability to offer advanced analysis of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature;
• An ability to articulate and substantiate at a high level an imaginative response to literature;
• An ability to demonstrate an advanced understanding of the cultural, intellectual, socio-political contexts of literature;
• An ability to articulate an advanced knowledge and understanding of conceptual or theoretical literary material; An advanced command of a broad range of vocabulary and critical literary terminology.

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• An advanced ability to analyse critically;
• An advanced ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in structured and systematic ways;
• An advanced ability to interpret complex information of diverse kinds through the distinctive skills derived from the subject;
• Expertise in conventions of scholarly presentation and bibliographical skills;
• An independence of thought and judgement, and ability to assess acutely the critical ideas of others;
• Sophisticated skills in critical reasoning;
• An advanced ability to handle information and argument critically;
• A competence in information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access;
• Professional organisation and time-management skills.

• Questions to guide reading, and other tasks of preparation, will be distributed prior to each seminar, offering some support for otherwise self-directed learning. Screenings of compulsory films will be offered. Seminars will mix whole-group and small-group discussion with readings, short film screenings, and (optional) practical exercises.
• Our module is team taught, and while practical questions should be sent to the module convener, all seminar leaders are available by email and in office hours to discuss module texts and topics.
• Our online learning environment (Ultra) will be used to share materials, news items, useful links, and our dedicated Library resources.
• Students may choose to convene outside of timetabled seminars or screenings in order to collaborate on seminar preparation, particularly if a communal task has been set.
• Students are encouraged to develop advanced conceptual abilities and analytical skills as well as the ability to communicate an advanced knowledge and conceptual understanding within seminars; the capacity for advanced independent study is demonstrated through the completion of two assessed pieces of work.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.

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