Preliminary secondary reading
To give you a grounding in some of the main lineaments of modernism, you may also want to read Michael Levenson’s ‘Introduction’ to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (to which you have access through the university library website). If you feel the wind in your readerly sails, have a look at the subsequent essays in the same volume.
Background texts
The texts in this third category won’t be directly examined, and you don’t HAVE to read them. They provide useful background and will, I hope, enhance your enjoyment of the unit.
- For a sense of the trends in visual art that accompanied literary modernism, I can highly recommend the now somewhat dated but still very informative series The Shock of the New (Caulfield has two copies at 709.04 S559.1 2009; the Clayton copy is on reserve for another unit).
- To gain a sense of the aesthetic of early modernism I can’t recommend highly enough Fritz Lang’s landmark film Metropolis. As a companion piece you might want to compare Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
- Head over to smarthistory.khanacademy.org and watch the short videos about modernist art. Begin with Manet (the father of “the modern” in art) and then look at the impressionists, the post-impressionists, Picasso (especially Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon), Matisse, and Dada (especially Marcel Duchamp).
- If you just want to relax, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris will give you something of a romanticised flavour of the period.
- Finally, why not listen to the BBC In our Time episode on literary modernism: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547fv
