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HS1002 The Shock of the Modern

Coordinators: Dr Bernard Attard and Prof Simon Gunn

Module Description

This is a module about how, why and when people became modern. We have called it the shock of

the modernbecause we are studying social, political, cultural, technological and economic changes

that led to radically different ways of being human and living together. There are three main themes.

The first is about how people became modern. We focus on identity, belief, and how modern people

lived and died, as well as the role of disaster in shaping modern peoples sense of well-being. The

second looks at living in the modern world. The key topics are the nation state, the modern city, the

measurement and management of time, the pace of modern existence, family, friendship and fun.

The final theme is about the challenges to being modern. We look at how people resisted different

aspects of modern life and tried to find alternatives to it. The time period we concentrate on is the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but for some topics we will be going back to earlier centuries.

Finally we ask whether, in the late twentieth century, ideas about who we are and the conditions in

which we live have changed so much that we can now describe ourselves as living in a post -modern

age.

Module Learning Outcomes

On completion of the module, you will be able to:

1. Analyse and evaluate the concepts of modernity, the pre-modern, the anti-modern and the

post-modern in their historical contexts.2.

Identify and discuss the origins of modernity as they affect personal identity, social life, and

public institutions and organisations, including the nation state.

3. Reflect critically on their own place in, and relationship, to the past and to historical

processes by understanding the historical origins and trajectory of modernity.

4. Demonstrate key historical skills, attributes and qualities (e.g. research; argumentation and

analysis; imagination) in written form in a variety of genres.

Teaching Method and Programme

There will be 20 lecture sessions for the entire student group, which will combine teacher-led

lectures, group work and film screening, and 8 seminars in which you will work in small groups under

the guidance of a tutor.

Lecture Topics

Week 1: Introduction: How the Module Works

Week 2: When and Where was the Modern?

Part 1: Being Modern

Week 3: The Modern Self: Interiority, Autonomy, Identity

Week 4: The Healthy Subject: Living and Dying in the Modern World

Week 5: Modernity, Reason and Secularisation

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Part 2: Making the Modern World,

Week 6: Imagined Communities: Nations and Nationalism

Week 7: Making the Modern Metropolis: Industry, Infrastructure and Urbanism

Week 8: Making Time: Speed, Mobility and Modernity

Part 3: Challenging the Modern

Week 9: Resisting and Re-inventing Modernity: Ideas, Movements and Beliefs

Week 10: The Post-modern and the End of Grand Narratives

Week 11: Review

Seminarswill start in Week 3of term and end in Week 10.

The full seminar programme, including questions and core reading, is available in the Overview

content area of the module Blackboard site

Reading

There is no recommended textbook for this module. All core readings are available in digital form

and are accessed through the E-Reading List on the Reading List content area of the module

Blackboard site.

Assignment Questions

Assignment A: Document Analysis (Seen Test):

Drawing on your seminar readings and the ideas you have encountered in the module so far,comment on how four of these documents express, represent or reflect one or more of the

following:

the contemporary experience or perception of being modern.

the qualities and characteristics historians and other commentators have identified as being

modern.

your own understanding of what it means to be modern.

Choose four documents only.

See the module Blackboard site for further information.

Assignment B:

Choose one only of the following options:

Option 1: Creative Writing Exercise

Drawing on the wider readings and ideas you have encountered in the module, write a piece of

futuristic fiction from the perspective of someone living in 1851 OR 1891 OR 1914 OR 1951 in which

the writer imagines the world fifty years from the time in which they are writing (e.g. someone

writing in 1851 trying to imagine the world in 1901).

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In undertaking this exercise, you might want to give an overview of social, cultural and political life,

or you might prefer to focus your piece not only on a particular year but also a particular theme or

related themes, such as gender, technologies, government, travel, family life, education, health or

any other topic or theme touched on by the module.

Option 2: Essay

Write an essay on one only of the following topics:

1. Was modernity the product of Europe?

2. What do historians mean when they use the term early modern to describe historical

change between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries?

3.

In what ways does the modern self differ from the pre-modern?

4. What are the main differences in the accounts given by commentators of the historical

formation of the modern self?

5.

Would you agree that a determination to control rather than accept the vulnerability ofhumans to disease and/or disaster is a fundamental element of modernity?

6. How did governments and public policies in the twentieth century reflect and create popular

expectations of safety and security in the modern world?

7. How did the scientific revolution contribute to modern understandings of the natural world

and society?

8.

How did the scientific revolution affect religious belief from the seventeenth to the

nineteenth centuries?

9. Are nations real or are they imagined? Illustrate your answer with at least two examples.

10.

To what extent were the historical processes of modernity responsible for the emergence of

the nation as a new form of political organization?

11.Is Marshall Berman right to see shock as the defining feature of the experience of the

modern city?

12.

Examine the ways the modern city has been represented in EITHER film OR novels. Your

answer should discuss a minimum of two films or novels.

13.Would you agree with the contention that there was nothing more fundamental to the

promise (and the threat) of modernity than speed. Getting further faster was what made

you modern.

14.Why, and in what ways, did people react against modernity in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries?

15.Why, and in what ways, did people seek to bring enchantment back into modern life?

16.Explain the idea of the postmodern condition and its relevance to the contemporary world.

17.

What are the implications of postmodernism for studying history?

Further details are available in the Assessment content area of the module Blackboard site.