The Moment in Modernism
Literature 175
Spring 2012
Tuesdays 5:00-7:00
Barker Center 012
Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé
zumhagenyekple@fas.harvard.edu
Office Hours: Th 9-11 and by appt.
This course examines the different iterations of the epiphanic, revelatory or banal moment long
considered definitive of modernist literature and visual culture. Questions we will explore include:
What accounts for modernism’s obsession with time and its anxiety about capturing the vanishing
past or evanescent present? Why does the moment emerge as a pressing category in modernism?
What do the various depictions of moments of being in modernist texts contribute to their treatment
of objectivity, subjectivity, the ordinary and the extraordinary? What is the relationship among
cinematic, photographic and literary representations of the moment? What is the relation of the
modernist epiphanic or revelatory moment to older traditions in mysticism, Enlightenment theories
of the sublime and 19th century interest in the uncanny? What is the role of the moment in the
ethical and aesthetic projects of high modernism? What is the relationship between the epiphanic
moment and narratives of the more extended unorthodox quests that also pervade modernist
literature? What is the relationship between boredom and expectation and the moments of being
which would seem to represent a dramatic departure from it? What is the relationship between the
moment as figure of stillness and attention to the distraction and mechanization of modernity?
Recommended secondary works of criticism and intertexts (which will be made available in class
and/or on the course iSite) are meant to supplement our primary readings when time allows, and to
provide students with supporting material for papers and presentations when time does not allow.
Required Texts (Available at the COOP and on Reserve at Lamont Library):
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)
Joan Mellen, Modern Times
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema
Films (on reserve in Lamont Media):
The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema 1834-1913
Landmarks of Early Cinema (compilations of early films) including:
Short films by Edison, Lumière, Pathé
Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon, The Devil and the Statue
Edwin S. Porter, The Life of an American Fireman; The Great Train Robbery
D.W. Griffith, Intolerance, A Corner in Wheat and A Girl and her Trust
Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera
Sergei Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin
Murphy/Leger/Man Ray, Ballet Mechanique
Siodmark/Unger/Wilder, People on Sundays
Schedule:
EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY/ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY
Week 1 (1/24)
Introduction: epiphanic, revelatory vs. mundane, ordinary
Fragments from William Wordsworth, Prelude (1805 edition); Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of
the Past;” Marcel Proust, “Overture,” In Search of Times Past; James Joyce, Stephen Hero,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Kafka, “On Parables”
Week 2 (1/31) Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway pp. 1-100
Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” selections
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
Of interest: “Modern Fiction,” “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “Street Haunting”
Week 3 (2/7)
Mrs. Dalloway pp. 101-218
Ann Banfield, “Remembrance and Tense Past”
Tammy Clewell, “Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War, and Modernist
Mourning”
Christine Froula, “Mrs. Dalloway’s Postwar Elegy”
Of interest: Laura Marcus, “The Shadow on the Screen: Virginia Woolf and the Cinema”
David Trotter, “Virginia Woolf”, Cinema and Modernism
Gilles Deleuze on Bergson: chapters 1 and 4, Cinema 1: The Movement Image
Ann Banfield, “Time Passes: Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism, and Cambridge Time”
and The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism, selections
Week 4 (2/14)
In-class screening of early cinema: of short films by Edison, Lumière, Pathé
Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon, The Devil and the Statue
Edwin S. Porter, The Life of an American Fireman; The Great Train Robbery
James Williamson, The Big Swallow
D.W. Griffith The Girl and her Trust, A Corner in Wheat, Intolerance selected scenes
Leger and Man Ray Ballet Mechanique
MOVEMENT IN STILLNESS
Week 5 (2/21) Discuss Early films
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde”;
“An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”
Mary Ann Doane, “Zeno’s Paradox: The Emergence of Cinematic Time” and “The
Representability of Time” from The Emergence of Cinematic Time
Of Interest: Michael Wood, “Modernism and Film”
Leo Charney, “In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity”
Mary Ann Doane, “Temporality, Storage, Legibility,” from The Emergence of Cinematic Time
Thomas Elsaesser, ed. Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative
Proto-cinema: Edweard Muybridge, Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion
Etienne-Jules Marey Animal Mechanism
Week 6 (2/28) Monday (2/27): Screening: Sergei Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, selections (“A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,”
“Theories of Montage”); Lev Kuleshov, “The Principles of Montage”
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye, selections
Yuri Tsivian, “Man with a Movie Camera—Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the
Twenties”
Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema,” “The Movie Novel”
P. Adams Sitney, “Revolutionary Time: Image and Title in Soviet Cinema”
Of interest: Gilles Deleuze, “Montage” from Cinema 1: The Movement Image
Scenes from Walter Ruttmann, Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, René Clair, Paris qui dort (1924)
and Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927) may be shown in class
Week 7 (3/6)
Monday (3/5): Screening: Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936)
Joan Mellen, Modern Times (BFI 2006)
Andre Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin” from What is Cinema?
Of interest: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
FIRST PAPER DUE Friday 3/9
Spring Break (start reading Magic Mountain)
TIME, IRONY, ALLEGORY
Week 8 (3/20) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, chapters 1-4
Thomas Mann, “The Making of The Magic Mountain”
Roman S. Struc, “The Magic Mountain: Time and Timelessness”
Week 9 (3/27) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, chapter 5
Joshua Kavaloski, “Performativity and the Dialectic of Time in Thomas Mann’s Der
Zauberberg”
Dorrit Cohn, “Telling Timelessness in Der Zauberberg”
Week 10 (4/3) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, chapter 6
Janelle Blankenship, “Arno Holz vs. Thomas Mann: Modernist Media Fantasies”
Week 11 (4/10) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, chapter 7
Alexander Nehamas, “Getting Used to Not Getting Used to It: Nietzsche in The Magic
Mountain”
Jill Ann Kowalik, “’Sympathy with Death’: Hans Castorp’s Nietzschean Resentment”
STILLNESS IN MOVEMENT
Week 12 (4/17) Monday 4/9 Screening Siodmark/Unger/Wilder, Menschen am Sonntag |
People on Sundays (1930)
Lutz Peter Koepnic, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: People on Sunday”
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Of interest: Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second selections
André Bazin “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography”
Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography”
Week 13 (4/24) Nathaniel Dorsky, Hours for Jerome Screening at Harvard Film Archive TBA
Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema
Jean Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable”
Simone Weil, From Gravity and Grace
FINAL PAPER DUE 5/4
Course Requirements:
• Class participation—including consistent attendance, active engagement in seminar discussion,
presentations, reading circle participation and weekly discussion questions and any short exercises I may
assign (30%)
• One mid-term paper, approximately 7 pages (30%)
• One final research paper, approximately 10 pages (40%)
Graduate students will be expected to hand in an article-length paper (approx 20 pages) at the end of the term
(though they may choose to hand in two shorter (conference-length or approx 10 pages) papers, or may
expand a shorter mid-term paper into a longer one to be handed in by the end of the semester.
Preparation and participation. The scholarly community we create in this seminar will be a group endeavor. Your
full intellectual presence is a part of the “social contract” tacit amongst all seminar participants. Please
complete the readings and be ready to share your ideas about it – and to listen attentively to the ideas of
others. Please bring your own copies of the reading to seminar. Use of laptops during the class is discouraged;
please use them only (as tends to happen) when necessary.
Weekly Questions. Students will submit at least two questions for class discussion each week as we embark on
each set of assigned texts. Questions you’d like to see discussed, any issues, points of confusion or
interpretation, etc. are to be emailed to me by 7:00 pm on Tuesdays before class.
Presentations. Students will each give at least one, (though very possibly two) presentation(s) on course readings
(alone or in pairs) during the course of the semester. Students will also take part in reading circles (see detailed
instructions for presentation/discussion leading and full description of Reading Circle requirements below).
These consist in small groups of students (not presenting on a given text) who will meet together outside of
class before their colleagues’ presentation to discuss points of the text carefully and formulate discussion
questions about it that they will put to the class following their colleagues’ presentation. Reading circle
groups act as the most attentive respondents of their peers’ presentations.
Accommodations for students with disabilities
Students needing academic adjustments or accommodations because of a disability documented in a letter
from the Accessible Education Office (AEO) should speak with me confidentially by the end of the second
week of the term to discuss appropriate implementation of course or room adjustments
For Harvard’s stance on academic integrity in Papers and Other Written Assignments, please visit the FAS
registrar: http://webdocs.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/faculty_handbook/current/chapter3/PapersOther.html
Presentation and Discussion-Leading Guidelines:
Assignment: At least once during the semester, each student will work alone or as a member of a pair
(depending on class size) to prepare a presentation of that day’s course material and lead class discussion of
the assigned readings (in essence, you’ll be getting to teach the class for a brief period).
Expectation: Your responsibilities are twofold: First, you are to put together an organized and cohesive
presentation of your ideas to the class. Your presentation should be thoughtfully provocatively, creatively
crafted in such a way that it engages the class in an active discussion, the leading of which is your second
responsibility. Since your presentation is meant to prompt the class to engage an extended discussion, it may
be helpful to conclude your 30 minutes or so with several questions you’d like to put to the class for general
discussion.
Preparation/Execution: The person or pair scheduled to present will come up with an issue, aspect of the
text, topic, argument or interesting angle on or interpretation of the work (or fragment thereof) they are
scheduled to present. Students working in pairs will be graded equally, so it is important that both students
participate equally in preparing the presentation.
Specifics: Before your presentation, those students working in pairs should divide the labor by each
choosing different tasks, interpretive approaches, courses of inquiry or parts of the book, etc. to concentrate
on (e.g. one student might look at the text in question in terms of its historical context while the other
concentrates on the relationship between the primary text and other intertexts and/or ideas. One student
might examine philosophical or artistic allusions or tie-ins while the other offers a close reading of a passage
(just to name a few possible examples). Presentations on secondary readings assigned in class in relation to
the primary text at hand are also encouraged. Before the day on which you are scheduled to present and lead
discussion the student-presenter or pair must compose a statement that offers 1) a list of the different tasks,
courses of inquiry, etc. of each of the members; 2. A concise statement of your arguments, interpretations
(or whatever lessons, insights or ideas you aim to convey to the class); 3. An outline of the direction the
argument will likely take and the textual examples you’ll likely refer to. This statement is to be sent to Prof.
Zumhagen-Yekplé by email by 7:00 pm the evening before the day of your presentation and then turned in
hard-copy form on the day of the presentation itself. These 30 minutes in the spotlight give you a chance to
offer new interpretations or enlightening information about the text, so creativity, as well as scholarship, is
encouraged.
TIPS: Some examples of approaches you might take (this is by no means an exhaustive list! Other ideas are
welcome; use your own strengths and interests.):
-Use intertexts (other texts—this includes films, visual art, music, literature, cultural histories, scientific
articles, etc, etc that are in some way related—or which you want to relate—to the text in question), source
texts (those which influenced the work in question or are alluded to within it) or historical background
material to shed light on the text you’re dealing with.
-Make relevant use of visual art, film or music and critical, literary and film theory to present new ways of
looking at your text.
Other components may include critical reception of the work, specific notable features of the work such as
narration style, stylistic innovation, relationship to other art forms (visual, plastic arts, architecture, film,
music, etc). You may also choose to do a close reading of a passage as a component. You may choose more
interactive modes of presenting (organizing class involvement, debates, enactments, etc). The presentations
and subsequent discussion-leading will be graded on a check/check-plus/check-minus basis.
If you need technological support, you must let me know at least a day in advance.
Reading Circle Respondents:
As each group prepares to present and lead class discussion, the reading circle pair or group responsible for
the text in question must also meet outside of class to discuss the assigned material. During reading-circle
group meetings, please have someone take minutes. These minutes should include a run-down of who
attended the circle meeting and some of the major questions posed and observations discussed, including
general reactions to the work, things you found interesting, what was remarkable or lacking in the text or
secondary literature, etc. The second group should also submit questions (one per member) to the
presenters via email for general class discussion. These minutes and discussion questions should be typed
and emailed to Karen by 9:00 pm the day before the student discussion leading/presentation takes place.
Please plan your meetings well in advance of the class discussion of the text to avoid difficulties scheduling
meetings the night before.
The reading circle group should be among the most attentive and vocal members of the class on days on
which student presentations are scheduled.