English 450. Senior Seminar: Modernism and Mass Culture

“The working man who went to the music hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself part of the act; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art. He will now go to the cinema, where his mind is lulled by contuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon, and will receive, without giving, in that same listless apathy with which the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art. He will also have lost some of his interest in life.”

T.S. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd”

“All up and down the street the mannequins were coming out of the shops, pausing on the pavements a moment, making them as gay and beautiful as beds of flowers before they walked swiftly away and the Paris night swallowed them up.”

Jean Rhys, “Mannequin”

“A dismal row of newspaper sellers standing clear of the pavement dealt with their wares from the gutter…the grimy sky, the mud of the stree, the rags of the dirty men harmonized excellently with the eruption of the damp, rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with priners’ ink”

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good.”

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Cinema, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, crowds, music halls, jazz, dance fads, fashion, lipstick: how did British and European modernist writers respond to popular culture? We will read theoretical works analyzing the relationships between high and low culture, the intellectuals and the masses, writing and technology, and textual and visual forms. We will read what modernists wrote about the new technologies of mass production, and discover both the excitement about, and antipathy towards, mass culture in their fiction and poetry. Topics will include the formation of intimate and/or avant-garde groups, such as Bloomsbury, as reactions to mass culture, and the theorization of the “mass” as sign of progress, on the one hand, or decadence, on the other. Authors and artists may include T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad, the Italian Futurists.

Written work for the class will culminate with a long research paper combining literary and cultural analysis. Students will be given a number of preparatory assignments designed to help them design their project, including very short exploratory essays and annotated bibliographies. Group work and peer review will be encouraged, with the proviso that the intellectual rewards of the seminar remain rooted in the splendid solitude of reading and writing. Each student will give an oral presentation on their work in progress, for which they will practice using visual and aural materials.