ENGL 546 A: Topics in Twentieth-Century Literature

Fashion and Modernism
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” –Oscar Wilde
Fashion explains everything.
More specifically, to be modern is to be in fashion—to be à la mode. The words are born of the same root: modo/mode/modernism/mood. Accordingly modernists from Baudelaire to Woolf are invested in fashion. “Fashion and Modernism” examines some aspects in the constellation of English and European sartorial culture circa the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s, with a few dips into America, accessories, and the contemporary moment.
“Fashion” in this context means both clothing and style—so things shall be explored alongside mien—that je ne sais quoi—that which evades tangible recording, rational thought, or explanation. While a major motif of the course is the consumption of female fashion, we will also explore the history of the dandy, theories of ornamentation, alongside emergent forms of urbanism, spatiality, and embodiment. Topics will include shopping and the rise of the department store; anti-ornament and anti-fashion; the flâneur/flâneuse; fashion of the historical avant-garde, and literary and visual archival instances foregrounding the fashion industry. Readings will range from the literary, the contextual, the theoretical, and the sociological(ish). We will have an archival sortie in which students will be exposed to what it is like to actually be around the stuff (“stuff”: a word that originally referred to the material for a dress).
“F&M” is a reading-intensive and discussion-based seminar. Students will be responsible for class presentations and a final paper employing some archival historical material from the modernist era, for instance culling from a period Vogue.
NOTE: Students are urged to have taken at least one previous course in British, American, or European modernism. College counts. Our methodology will be an historical one focused on the specified time period. Prior to the first class, have (re)read Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman” from After the Great Divide, and make a dent in Zola’s wonderful novel Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), in the Nelson translation (Oxford World Classics, ISBN 978-0199536900). Zola is summer reading at its greatest, by the way. All readings will be in English. The class’s dress code will be announced anon.