ENGL3811: Modernism, Movement and Dance

• While not essential, it is recommended that students have taken ENGL2081 Literature of the Modern Period at Level 2.

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• To examine the relationship between modernist writing and dance in terms of body imagery, aesthetics, technique, and performance history in late nineteenth and twentieth-century literary culture.
• To introduce students to interdisciplinary methodologies that combine more traditional literary approaches with concepts drawn from performance studies, dance studies and theories of embodiment.
• To explore how literary texts, across different genres, represented and responded to new ways of thinking about the body and modernity.
• To consider how modernist authors and performers might have influenced one another in formal, visual, and thematic terms, as well as engaging with shared cultural and historical contexts.

• Covers literary and performances sources from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period.
• Examines texts across a range of literary forms poems, novels, plays, essays, and manifestos and places them in conversation with performance sources including but not limited to: photographs, illustrations, stage and costume designs, films and recordings, dancers memoirs, and reviews.
• Models an approach to modernism that goes beyond the traditional literary canon, problematizing ideas about high art and popular cultural activities in order to think across art forms and disciplinary boundaries.
• Introduces students to important critical and theoretical texts by scholars of modernism and performance.
• Looks at how writers and dancers engaged with major ideas and themes of the period; for instance, gender, sexuality, race, nationalism and technology.
• Pays special attention to the relationship between gender and particular modes of aesthetic production.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Knowledge of a range of literary texts across different genres and their links with important movements in the performing arts during the modernist period.
• New interdisciplinary methods that will enrich their existing skills in literary criticism.
• A wide-ranging understanding of different representations of the body in literature and dance, supported by relevant cultural and historical contexts.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• skills of effective communication and argument
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

Key Skills:

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• competence in the planning and execution of essays
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work o Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• 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.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the essay may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Before the first essay, students will have an individual consultation session in which they are able to show their seminar leader a list of points relevant to the essay and receive oral comment on these points. Students will be encouraged to discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.

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