Modernism and the Market

This course explores the complexities of modernist writers' engagements with the capitalist marketplace. A traditional view of modernist art understands it as antithetical to the brute, mechanical diktats of commodity culture. This course aims to qualify this position by foregrounding the ambivalence that surrounds modernist encounters with the market. Reading works by a selection of major Anglo-American novelists and poets, we will consider the mixture of horror and delight with which modernists surveyed a gleaming new landscape of consumer products and a capitalist economy violently transforming traditional ways of life; we will reflect on the ways in which modernists' anxieties and desires concerning the commodity status of their own work are internalised in their writing; and we will think through the relationship between modernism's challenge to meaning and representation and changes in the nature of money and the structure of the global economy in the early twentieth century. Credit Level: 10 Year taken: Year 3 Undergraduate

Not running in 2025/26