ENG40720 Concepts of Modernity
Seminar List
1. What is the Enlightenment (PF)
2. The Romantic Critique (PF)
3. The Twentieth-Century Critique (PF)
4. Victorian Responses to Industrial Modernity (ND)
5. Popular Urban Culture and the Modernisation of Everyday Life (ND)
6. Twentieth-Century Accounts: Benjamin, Crary. (ND)
7. Marxism (AF)
8. Psychoanalysis (AF)
9. Poststructuralism (AF)
Weeks 1-3: Enlightenment and Modernity
Preliminary Reading
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton UP, 1951)
Terry Eagelton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell, 1990)
David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (U of California P, 1980)
Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge UP, 1995)
James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions (U of California Press, 1996)
Seminar 1: What is the Enlightenment?
Immanuel Kant, ‘Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’
David Hume, Book I ‘Of the Understanding’ from A Treatise of Human Nature
Voltaire, Articles on ‘Superstition’ and ‘Toleration’ from the Philosophical Dictionary
J.J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men
Seminar 2: The Romantic Critique of
the Enlightenment
Edmund Burke, Part 2 of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge, extract from the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads
P. B. Shelley, extract from ‘A Defence of Poetry’
Extract from Fred Botting, Gothic
Seminar 3: The Twentieth Century
Critique of the Enlightenment
Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment’
Michel Foucault, ‘The Panopticon’ from Discipline and Punishment
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception’ from Dialectic of Enlightenment
Selected Reading List
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford UP, 1953)
A Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Harvard UP, 1991)
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Chatto & Windus, 1999)
Fred Botting, Gothic
Peter Brooks, ‘Virtue and Terror: The Monk’, English Literary History, 40 (1973)
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton UP, 1951)
Ian Donnachie and Carmen Lavin, From Enlightenment to Romanticism , 2 vols (Manchester UP, 2003 and 2004)
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell, 1990)
Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction
James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Harvard, 1981).
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation
Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge UP, 1975)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Rebirth of the Prison (Allen Lane, 1977)
Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Yale UP, 1998)
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Harvard UP, 1989)
Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime
David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (U of California P, 1980)
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion
Jeremy Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction
Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans J. Cumming (Continuum, 1972)
Theresa M. Kelly, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics
Arthur Lovejoy, ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford UP, 2001)
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology
D. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge UP, 1993)
Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge UP, 1995)
W.J.B. Owen, Wordsworth as Critic
Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years
James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions (U of California Press, 1996)
J Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political Philosophy (Princeton UP, 1992)
T Strong, Jean-Jacque Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Sage, 1994)
Z Trachtenberg, Making Citizens (Routledge, 1993)
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence
R Wockler, Rousseau (Oxford UP, 1995)
Weeks 4-6
Weeks 4-6: Victorian Responses to Modernity
Week 1: Victorian Critiques
Thomas Carlyle, from Past and Present; “Signs Taken for Wonders”
John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic”, from The Stones of Venice.
Week 2: Popular Urban Culture and the Modernisation of Everyday Life
Chapters on Music Hall in Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City.
Week 3: 20 th -Century Accounts
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century”;
Jonathan Crary, from Suspensions of Perception .
Selected Reading List
Bailey, Peter, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City , Cambridge, CUP,
1998.
Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project , trans., Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin,
Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1999.
-- Illuminations . New York, Schocken, 1969
-- Reflections , New York, Schocken Books, 1978.
Bowlby, Rachel, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola, New York, Methuen, 1985.
Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectic of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project,
Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991.
Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, Mass., October, 1992.
--, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture , Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2000.
Daly, Nicholas, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2004.
de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, U. California Press, 1984.
Fraser, W. Hamish, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850-1914, Hamden. Conn., Archon Books, 1981.
Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley, U. California Press, 1993.
Gallagher, Catherine, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832-1867. Chicago, U. Chicago Press, 1985.
Giedion, Siegfried, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous
History , New York, W.W. Norton, 1969.
Hobhouse, Christopher, 1851 and the Crystal Palace. London: John Murray, 1951.
Mannoni, Laurent, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, Archaeology of the Cinema,
trans. Richard Crangle, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000.
Miller, Andrew H., Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative,
Cambridge, CUP, 1995.
Picker, John M., Victorian Soundscapes, Oxford, OUP, 2003.
Seltzer, Mark, Bodies and Machines , New York and London, Routledge, 1992.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Berkeley, California UP, 1986.
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. New
York: Columbia, 2001.
Sternberger, Dolf, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans., Joachim Neugroschel,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1977.
Sussman, Herbert, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology,
Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1968.
Thurschwell, Pamela, Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 ,
Cambridge, CUP, 2001
Wiener, Martin, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spririt, 1850-1980.
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981.
Williams, Rosalind, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late 19th-Century France,
Berkeley, U. California Press, 1982.
Weeks 7-9: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism
Week 7. Concepts of Modernity/Postmodernity
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. London: Verso, 1979.
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity . Oxford: Polity Press, 2000.
Benjamin, Walter. “Paris the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduciblity: Second Version.” Selected Writings Volume 3: 1935-1938. Belknap: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London, Verso, 1983.
Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2005.
O'Connor, Brian, ed. The Adorno Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Week 8. Post-Structuralism/ Psycholanalysis
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
---. Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction . Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. Studies on Hysteria . Pelican Freud, Volume 3.
---. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Pelican Freud, Volume 11.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis . Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature. London: Palgrave, 2001.
Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London: Routledge, 2001.
Week 9. Ethics and Postmodernity: Reconceiving the Other
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London: Verso, 2004.
---. Giving an Account of Oneself . New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
Irigaray, Luce. Sharing the World: From Intimate to Global Relations . London: Continuum, 2008.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. London: Nijhoff, 1981.
Said, Edward W. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2003.
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.
---. The Paul Virilio Reader . Ed. Steve Redhead. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Zizek, Slavoj. Violence (Big Ideas). London: Profile Books, 2008.
(Excerpts from books not in the library will be supplied)
