Ethics and Aesthetics of British Modernism

Course title: Ethics and Aesthetics of British Modernism
Instructor: Martina Domines Veliki, PhD
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 2nd or 4th semester
Status: elective
Course type: 1 hour of lecture, 2 hours of seminar
Prerequisites: completed undergraduate studies
Course description: The course deals with trauma theory the New Poverty Studies in order to address the issue of modernist subjectivity in a wider socio-political context after the First World War.
Course requirements: continuous assessment (midterm and final exam, final paper, class attendance and participation).

Weekly schedule:
Week 1: socio-historical context, 1930s in England
Week 2: First World War and war trauma
Week 3: Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Week 4: Mrs. Dalloway continued
Week 5: Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen (selections of poetry)
Week 6: Goodbye To All That (1929)
 Week 7: Mid-term exam
Week 8: New Poverty Studies, introduction
Week 9: The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
Week 10: The Garden Party and Other Stories continued
Week 11: Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Week 12: Down and Out continued
Week 13: Pygmalion (1913)
Week 14: final remarks
Week 15: End-term exam, seminar paper


Reading list:
Primary literature:
Virginia Woolf (1925) Mrs. Dalloway
Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen – selections of poetry
Robert Graves (1929) Goodbye To All That
Katherine Mansfield (1922) The Garden Party and Other Stories
George Orwell (1933) Down and Out in Paris and London
George Bernard Shaw (1913) Pygmalion

Secondary literature:
Caruth, Cathy (ed.)
Trauma – Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995)
Childs, Peter. Modernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
Clarke, J., C. Critcher and R. Johnson. Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979)
Ellison, David. Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature (Cambridge UP, 2001)
Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction: from Chartism to Trainspotting (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1997)
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy (Penguin Books, 1960)
Howarth, Peter. British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2005)
Hunt, Nigel C. Memory, War and Trauma (Cambridge UP, 2010)
Innes, Christopher. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw (Cambridge UP, 1998)
Korte, Barbara, Frédéric Regard (eds.) Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014)
Leys, Ruth. Trauma-A Genealogy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007)
Linehan, Thomas. Modernism and British Socialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)
Punter, David. The Literature of Pity (Edinburgh UP, 2014)
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Blackwell Publishing, 2007)
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (The University of Chicago Press, 1994)
Russo, John and Sherry Lee Linkon. New Working-Class Studies (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2005)
Sellers, Susan (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge UP, 2000)
Silkin, Jon (ed.) The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 1978)