Module Identifier | ENM6420 | ||
Module Title | SHOP TILL YOU DROP: FICTION AND CONSUMER CULTURE 1880-1935 | ||
Academic Year | 2001/2002 | ||
Co-ordinator | Dr Christoph Lindner | ||
Semester | Semester 1 | ||
Pre-Requisite | Good honours degree | ||
Co-Requisite | ENM0120 , ENM0220 , Three other MA option modules | ||
Course delivery | Seminar | 10 Hours (5 X 2 hours) |
Seminar Programme
1. The rise of consumer culture
Themes for discussion: what is consumerism? historical and social background, cultural conditions, material forms, literary responses.
Main text: David Hawkes, Ideology
2. Shopping for Pleasure
Themes for discussion: flanerie, fetishism, desire, spectacle, exhibition, gender and seduction.
Main text: Emile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise
3. The Metropolis on Display
Themes for discussion: urban growth, metropolitan culture, predatory consumers, domesticity, gender and performance.
Main text: Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
4. Decadence and Decay
Themes for discussion: urban space, constructing time, anarchy, pornography, gender and politics.
Main text: Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
5. Everything for Sale
Themes for discussion: dystopias, mass culture, consumer psychology, discourse, agency, subjectivity.
Main text: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Set Texts
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Penguin Classics)
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Penguin Classics)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Penguin)
Emile Zola, The Ladies Paradise (Oxford World's Classics)
David Hawkes, Ideology (Routledge, 1996)
Select Bibliography
Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (Methuen, 1985)
Rachel Bowlby, Shopping With Freud (Routledge, 1993)
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Harvard UP, 1983)
Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford UP, 2000)
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914 (Verso, 1991)
Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992)