Tues: 4pm, J208

Prof. Nicholas Daly,

Dr Porscha Fermanis,
Prof. Anne Fogarty

ENG40720 Concepts of Modernity

1. (September 17) What is Enlightenment (PF)

2. The Romantic Critique of Enlightenment (PF)
3. The Twentieth-Century Critique of Enlightenment (PF)
4. (October 8) Victorian Responses to Industrial Modernity (ND)
5. Victorian Public Spheres (ND)
6. Twentieth-Century Accounts: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades (ND)
No classes Week of October 28: Reading Period
7. (November 5) Postmodernism (AF)
8. Psychoanalysis (AF)
9. Memory (AF)
Assessment: 5000-word essay due by noon, Friday, December 6. (This essay
should also be uploaded to SafeAssign.

Weeks 1-3: Enlightenment and Modernity

Enlightenment and Modernity
Dr. Porscha Fermanis: porscha.fermanis@ucd.ie

Seminar 1: Enlightenement and Counter-Enlightenment

Immanuel Kant, Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment
J.J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men
Suggested secondary reading: Dorinda Outram, Enlightenment; James Schmidt, What
is Enlightenment?
Seminar 2: The Romantic Critique of Enlightenment
Edmund Burke, Part II of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful
P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Suggested secondary reading: M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp; Jerome
McGann, The Romantic Ideology; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic
Seminar 3: The Twentieth-Century Critique of Enlightenment
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkeimer, The Concept of Enlightenment from
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment from The Foucault Reader and The
Panopticon from Discipline and Punishment
Suggested secondary reading: David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory:
Horkheimer to Habermas

Selected Reading List

Seminar 1: Enlightenment
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton UP, 1951)
Duncan Forbes, Humes Philosophical Politics (Cambridge UP, 1975)
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity
1650-1750 (Oxford UP, 2001)
Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge UP, 1995)
James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and
Twentieth Century Questions (U of California Press, 1996)
Tracy B. Strong, Jean-Jacque Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Sage, 1994)
Robert Wokler, Rousseau (Oxford UP, 1995)
Seminar 2: Romanticism
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(Oxford
UP, 1953)
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Chatto & Windus, 1999)
Terry Eagelton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell, 1990)
James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Harvard,
1981)
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of
Individuation (Routledge, 1992)
Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (Columbia
UP, 1985)
Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworths Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 1998)
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (U of Chicago P,
1983)
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence (John Hopkins UP, 1976)
Seminar 3: Critique of Enlightenment

J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge UP, 2001)

Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theoey (U of Wales P, 1999)
Deborah Cook, Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society (Routledge,
2004)
Anthony Cascardi, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge UP, 1992)
Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 1980)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Rebirth of the Prison (Allen Lane, 1977)
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Polity Press, 1990)
Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, 1987)
--The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Harvard UP, 1989)
David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (U of Cal Press,
1980)
T. Huhn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge UP, 2004)
Frederick Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (Verso,
1990)
Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans J.
Cumming
(Continuum, 1972)
Martin Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas and the
Problem of
Communicative Freedom (State U of NY P, 2001)
Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Postmodernism, trans. D. Midgley (MIT Press, 1991)
--Endames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity, trans. D. Midgley (MIT Press,
1998)

Weeks 4-6: Victorian Responses to Modernity (N. Daly)

Week 1: Victorian Critiques
Thomas Carlyle, Captains of Industry, from Past and Present
John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic, from The Stones of Venice.
Background reading; chapter on Victorian Culture and Industrial Modernity on
Blackboard, under Module Documents.
The Carlyle and Ruskin pieces are widely anthologized, and available free online.

Week 2: Popular Urban Culture and the Public Sphere

Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City [chapter 6]
available on Blackboard under Module Documents
Background reading: Michel de Certeau, excerpts from The Practice of Everyday Life.
Available on Blackboard under Module Documents

Week 3: 20th-Century Accounts of 19th -century Modernity.

Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire and Paris, Capital of the 19th
Century.
"Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" is available through JSTOR in Perspecta, Vol. 12,
(1969), pp. 165-172. It's also available in the Library in the collection Reflections and
in the The Arcades Project, but there are only a few copies of these.
"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" is in the collection Illuminations. The library has
multiple copies of this book in short and long loan collections.
Suggested background reading: Susan Buck Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Library,
short loan).

Selected Reading List

Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 18301880, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
Bailey, Peter, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Cambridge, CUP,
1998.
Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans., Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin,
Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1999.
-- Illuminations. New York, Schocken, 1969
-- Reflections, New York, Schocken Books, 1978.
Bowlby, Rachel, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola, New
York, Methuen, 1985.
Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991.
Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, Mass., October, 1992.
--, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture,
Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2000.
Daly, Nicholas, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge UP,
2004.
-- Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, U. California Press,
1984.
Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley, U.
California Press, 1993.
Gallagher, Catherine, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832-1867.
Chicago, U. Chicago Press, 1985.
Giedion, Siegfried, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous
History, New York, W.W. Norton, 1969.
Habermas, Juergen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge,
Polity, 1989.
Hobhouse, Christopher, 1851 and the Crystal Palace. London: John Murray, 1951.

Miller, Andrew H., Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative,
Cambridge, CUP, 1995.
Picker, John M., Victorian Soundscapes, Oxford, OUP, 2003.
Seltzer, Mark, Bodies and Machines, New York and London, Routledge, 1992.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and
Space in the 19th Century, Berkeley, California UP, 1986.
Singer, Ben, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts.
New York: Columbia, 2001.
Sternberger, Dolf, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans., Joachim Neugroschel,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1977.
Sussman, Herbert, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology,
Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1968.
Thurschwell, Pamela, Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920,
Cambridge, CUP, 2001
Wiener, Martin, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spririt, 1850-1980.
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford, OUP, 1975.
Williams, Rosalind, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late 19th-Century France,
Berkeley, U. California Press, 1982.

Weeks 7-9: Postmodernism; Sexuality and the Body; Violence, Culture

and Power (A. Fogarty)
1. Concepts of Modernity and Postmodernism: Culture and Ideology (Theodor
Adorno and Fredric Jameson)
Adorno, Theodor W., Commitment. Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the
Classic Debate in German Marxism. London: Verso, 1977.
----. Semblance and Expression and Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics.
Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: The Athlone Press, 1997.
----. Trying to Understand Endgame. Notes to Literature I. Trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
Jameson, Fredric. Modernism as Ideology. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the
Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002.
---. Theories of the Postmodern. Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
---. Ideological Analysis: A Handbook. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso,
2010.

2. Sexuality and the Body: Redefining the Other (Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray)
Butler, Judith. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis and the Production of the Heterosexual
Matrix. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge,
1990.
---. Promiscuous Obedience. Antigones Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death.
New York: Columbia U P, 2000.
Irigaray, Luce. Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look. This Sex Which is Not One.
Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
---. The Age of the Breath. Luce Irigaray: Key Writings. London: Continuum, 2004.
---. The Path Towards the Other. Sharing the World. London: Continuum, 2008.

Violence, Culture and Power (Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj iek)

Agamben, Giorgio. The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern. Homo Sacer:
Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
---. Nudity. Nudities. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2011.
iek, Slavoj. Why Does the Phallus Appear? Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan
in Hollywood and Out. London: Routledge, 2001.
---. Depression: The Neuronal Trauma, or, The Rise of the Proletarian Cogito. And
Acceptance: The Cause Regained. Welcome to the End Times! London: Verso, 2010.