1. EN123: Modern World Literature

2. The Specials, “Rat Race” (1980)
The Specials, “Rat Race” (1980)
You're working at your leisure to learn the things you'll need The promises you make tomorrow will carry no guarantee I've seen your qualifications, you've got a Ph.D. I've got one art O level, it did nothing for me
Working for the rat race You know you're wasting your time Working for the rat race You're no friend of mine
You plan your conversation to impress the college bar Just talking about your Mother and Daddy's Jaguar Wear your political T-shirt and sacred college scarf Discussing the worlds situation but just for a laugh
You'll be working for the rat race You know you're wasting your time Working for the rat race You're no friend of mine

7. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins:
“When three centuries ago the slaves came to the West Indies, they entered directly into the large-scale agriculture of the sugar plantation, which was a modern system. It further required that the slaves live together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time. The cane they reaped had to be rapidly transported to what was factory production. The product was shipped abroad for sale. [. . .] The Negroes, therefore, from the very start lived a life that was in essence a modern life.” (p. 306)

9. Modernity: A period (e.g. 1789-1989, or 1492-present)?
An attitude to the present?
A condition corresponding to the rise of the modern (capitalist) world system?

13. To be modern … is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows. (Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Verso, 345)

14. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto)

15. [Modernism is] any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it. (Berman)

16. “The modernism of underdevelopment is forced to build on fantasies and dreams of modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts. In order to be true to the life from which it springs, it is forced to be shrill, uncouth and inchoate. … But the bizarre reality from which this modernism grows, and the unbearable pressures under which it moves and lives – social and political pressures as well as spiritual ones – infuse it with a desperate incandescence that Western modernism, so much more at home in its world, can rarely hope to match.” (Berman)

17. Five features of modernity
A break with the past
Time is always ‘out of joint’
Space-time compression
The rise of the ‘everyday’
An experience of fragmentation, displacement and dispersal

18. A break with the past
‘Big ditch’ theories of history – cf. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: modernity as the rise of ‘Market Society’
Inventing ‘tradition’ as necessary counterpoint to modernity
A felt need to reject the past in order to make way for the new; or else to recover the past in order to criticise the present (primitivism, Gothic, some versions of Romanticism)

19. Disjointed time
Living at odds with one’s time: living in two or more times at once
Ernst Bloch: ‘the contemporariness of the non-contemporary’
Rise of the ‘modern primitive’: combining the archaic with the contemporary (Marinetti, Tzara, de Andrade)

20. Space-time compression
Collapse of space, acceleration of time: transport and communications revolutions
Speed-ups in production, consumption and the pace of living
“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place” – the Red Queen in Alice through the Looking Glass

22. “The latest round of time-space compression has also realized a gruesomely peculiar mixture of the speed-up in the production of all nature: the shift from the 45- to the 57-second ‘minute’ in autowork; faster-growing transgenic salmon; faster-milking, hormone-injected cows; and perhaps most spectacularly, the transition from the 73-day chicken in 1955 to the 42-day chicken in 2005”. (Jason W. Moore)

23. The rise of the everyday
Baudelaire: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (“The Painter of Modern Life”)

24. Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877)

25. Emancipation
Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guard only to sweeten the cup of man? Is not this indirectly to deny women reason? … [A]s the whole system of representation is now, in this country, only a convenient handle for despotism, [women] need not complain, for they are as well represented as a numerous class of hard working mechanics, who pay for the support of royalty when they can scarcely stop their children’s mouths with bread. (Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women)

26. Fragmentation
‘World literature’ as a system in which the epic – the unified narrative of a people – is no longer possible

27. But is ‘world literature’ possible?
“Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its arrival.” (Goethe)