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Classics Department COURSE SPECIFICATION FORM for new course proposals and course amendments DEPARTMENT OF: MEDIA ARTS Academic Session: Valid from 2008-2009 Status: Course Code: MA3073 Course Value: 1 Option (ie:Core, or Optional) Availability: Critical Problems in Modernism and Course Title: (state which teaching Autumn/Spring Modernity terms) Prerequisites: Pass year two Recommended: MA2059; MA2055 Co-ordinator: Prof. Christopher Townsend Prof. Christopher Townsend Course Staff Aims: 1. Develop students’ understanding of the complex relationship between media of modernity (film, radio, photography) and modernism as a cultural impulse. 2: Develop student’s understanding of the ways in which new media and their cultural impact was theorised in the period. 3. Develop students’ research skills through the independent and guided study of a range of media and related theories and texts. 4. Give students the experience of undertaking a detailed, self-managed research projects in the form of essays. 5. Develop students’ critical skills, written and oral, through seminar discussion. Learning Outcomes: Having successfully completed the course students will be able to: 1. Use a range of different research methodologies. 2. Evaluate the viability of different research methods and the applicability of certain methods for specific research projects. 3. Write, explain and justify a research proposal. 4. Critically analyse a range of media forms and theoretical texts. 5. Work independently, making effective use of library, archival and Internet resources, and demonstrating efficient time management. 6. Select, organise and deploy ideas and information in order to formulate cogent arguments and express them effectively in written and oral forms. Course This course examines ideas of time and space and new media (film, photography and radio) Content: in high modernism in the context of the theoretical framework that modernism provides for itself to understand the transformed relationship of culture to modernity. Whereas the second year courses MA2059 and MA2055 establish general historical contexts for modernist film in the avant-garde and mass-culture respectively, here we are placing these films firstly in a specific critical context, secondly in a wider theoretical context, and thirdly in a detailed historical relation that uses this theoretical platform. We also use this framework to interrogate some of the critical problems for the imagination and use of media within modernism. The new media in question range from mainstream narrative films and ‘art cinema’ – Chaplin’s Modern Times to avant-garde film and experiments with sound in new media such as radio (Pound’s Cavalcanti) and the use of sound in Dada poetry. Central questions addressed in the course will include the structure of the human subject (the philosophical subject of being) within modernity, modernism’s resistance to clear vision through forms of occlusion and blinding; the resistance to a culture of linear, ‘Taylorised’ time and space that film and photography might be understood to embody as much as the production line; the consequences of the First World War in producing a horror of modernity’s effects, and the reaction to a notion of the perfectible body that might be seen as characterising, for different artists, the appeals of fascism, socialist realism and consumer capitalism. Part One: The “Structure” of the Modern Subject 1: What Modernity and When? The Subject and Modernity 2: The Structure of Time and Space: Production Line 3: The Structure of Time and Space: Entertainment 4: The Structure of Seeing: Cinematograph 5: The Structure of Saying: Performance and the Gramophone Week 6: Reading week Part Two: Theoretical Responses 7: Dialectic 8: Chance 9: Obsolescence: the profane illumination 10: The Aspiration to Music 11: Estrangement Part Three: Practical Solutions to Theoretical Problems 12: Asyndetony or Synthesis? Specificity versus Intermediality: The theorisation of expanded cinema in Futurism and Dada 13: Montage, the Revolution and Alienation 14: The Truth of the Object: The New Objectivity 15: Surrealism’s Assault on Vision 16: Responses to Hygienic Modernism and the Return to Man 17: Reading week, essay tutorials Part Four: Historical Contexts and Problems 18: Germany: Social Panic, Reification and Commoditisation 19: France: Retrenchment and the Aftermath of War 20: Britain: Never So Modern Again 21: Britain: The Politics of Landscape 22: Essay tutorials Teaching & Lectures, seminars, student seminar presentations (assessed), essays. Learning Methods: Abel, R. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton University Press, 1984); Abel, Key Bibliography: R. (ed.) French Film Theory and Criticism, Vol.1, 1907-1929 (Princeton University Press, 1988); Armstrong, T. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Baker, G. The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT Press, 2007); Bataille, G. (Stoekl, A. ed.) Visions of Excess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Butler, R. Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1910-1916 (Oxford University Press, 1994); Doane, M-A. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency and the Archive (Harvard University Press, 2003); Eiland, H. & Jennings, M.W. (eds.) Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927 – 1934 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); Eiland, H. & Jennings, M.W. (eds.) Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938 – 1940 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); Fisher, M. Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments 1931-1933 (MIT Press, 2003); Golan, R. Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (Yale University Press, 1995); Green, C. Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928 (Yale University Press, 1987); Guerlac, S. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Cornell University Press, 2006); Kern, S. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 – 1918 (Harvard University Press, 1983); Kittler, F. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999); Kracauer, S. (Levin, T.Y. (ed. & trans.)) The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Harvard University Press, 1995); Moholy-Nagy, L. Painting Photography Film (MIT Press, 1977); Sheppard, R. Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism (Northwestern University Press, 2000); Watts, H. Chance: A Perspective on Dada (UMI Research Press, 1980) Full list already sent to library Formative Two 20 minute tutorials; one in each term. Peer critique in seminars. Assessment & Feedback: Summative Exam (0%) (hours) Assessment: Coursework (100%) (two essays, 4500-5500 words each) [90% of overall mark]; seminar presentation of 20-30 minutes [10% of overall] Deadlines: One essay delivered mid spring term, one delivered early summer term; seminar presentation by agreement with course tutor at start of session. The information contained in this course outline is correct at the time of publication, but may be subject to change as part of the Department’s policy of continuous improvement and development. Every effort will be made to notify you of any such changes. .
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