Modernism
In the Autumn semester of 2012 I'll be teaching on the University of Lincoln's core second-year module "Making it New: An Introduction to Literary Modernism." The module aims to enable students to read (and enjoy) modernist texts and to understand the differences between modernist and "normal" writing, to discuss the ideological implications of modernist texts and the relationship of the modernists to their historical context. Students explore some of the most influential texts associated with modernist experimentation – including James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Ezra Pound's Cantos, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, Samuel Beckett's Endgame and Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss."
In conjunction with teaching this module, I'm also developing my research into the modernist aspects of Ernst Bloch's philosophy – particularly his debates concerning Expressionist aesthetics. The chapter is titled “Unearthing the ‘gold-bearing rubble’: Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism” and is being published next year in Utopianism, Modernism and Literature in the Twentieth Century, ed. Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell (Palgrave, forthcoming 2013).
Image by Père Ubu under a CC BY-NC license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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