| Unit name | Modernism and the Body |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ENGL30034 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Professor. Maude |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None. |
| Co-requisites |
None. |
| School/department | Department of English |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
In an essay on illness, Virginia Woolf writes of the need in literature to represent such experiences as 'heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness', sensations and bodily expressions that are crucial to the everyday. Along with her fellow modernist W. B. Yeats, and like writers from Mann to Beckett and Faulkner, Woolf also wrote astutely about the experience of ageing. These and other authors have all written with profundity and compassion about the many varieties of embodied experience: sex and childbirth, eating and defecation, pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion. Literary texts help us understand the complexities of embodied life, for they tend to deal with the more ambivalent areas of experience where simple definitions break down or prove inadequate. The greatest literary texts seldom propose straightforward answers. Rather, they rather provide us with nuanced representations that question the reductive categorisations that embodiment resists.
On successful completion of this unit students will have
(1) developed a detailed knowledge and critical understanding of modernist literature on the body;
(2) in-depth understanding of the theoretical contexts that inform thinking about the body;
(3) demonstrated the ability to analyse and evaluate differing critical accounts of the primary literature;
(4) demonstrated the ability to identify and evaluate pertinent evidence in order to develop/illustrate a cogent argument;
(5) strengthened their skills in argumentation and academic writing.
1 x 2-hour seminar per week.
Both summative elements will assess ILOs 1-5.
