Subject Area: English
This course can also be studied in the following specialisation: Media, Culture and Technology & Creative Writing

This course provides a rich and panoramic survey of the early Twentieth Century’s most dynamic and aesthetically invigorating cultural movement. Moving back and forth between select cinematic and literary texts, the course opens pathways between these two critical Modernist media. It demonstrates how writers were adopting technical ideas from the new mechanical medium, even as artists and poets turned to the cinema to exploit its ‘poetic’ capacities. Navigating a pathway though some of the most exciting avant-garde currents in Europe and America, the course blends primary documents with key critical materials in order to instill a thorough understanding of Modernist cultural forms. It also considers the phenomenon of ‘vernacular modernism’ in mainstream Hollywood films, and interrogates both Hollywood’s popularisation of certain experimental features and its patronage of hungry writers in the Great Depression.

The course is structured around three intensive modules:
(1) Avant-garde Modernism in film and writing.
(2) High Modernism, the moment of ""masterpieces"".
(3) Vernacular Modernism, the vulgate of modernity.