ENGL20022: Modernism and Avant Garde

1x1500 essay (worth 40%) and 1x2000 word essay (worth 60%) and 80% tute attendence is a hurdle

Where my review of Modern and Contemporary Literature from first year was mixed but optimistic, I really don't have many positive comments to make about this subject. I'll break this up like I did with ModCon:

Lectures:
I have this theory: half of the people in the English Department wish they were in Art History. I'd estimate that around 60% of lectures all up was spent analysing paintings. I wouldn't mind if this was for the sake of contextualising the time period, or if the art was a little more directly related to the texts we were studying, but in reality the lectures were a mix of sociology and art analysis masquerading as a Literature subject.

Perhaps some of this muddling can be attributed to how ill-defined 'Modernism' is. Admittedly when studying a whole movement, I also find it useful to look at surrounding culture, events, people, works, etc. But dear lord was there a lot of freakin painting analysis in this subject. In one of the Ulysses lectures - a text which I love and was half the reason why I chose this subject - about 5 minutes in the lecturer said words to the effect of 'Ulysses was written in 1922, and here is a painting from that same year.' That was the only substantial reference to the text for the whole 90 minutes; everything from that point onwards was about various sketches and prints from Dublin circa 1920's -.-

By Week 4 I was skipping parts of, if not whole lectures and just x2ing them online. By the midsem break I'd even given up on that. I was told by a friend in my tute that lecture attendance dwindled significantly, though this is a natural decline that's happened in most of my subjects over the course of each semester, so make of that what you will. At some point around Week 10 I went back to see what I was missing, and weirdly the lecturer kept asking really close-ended questions (eg. What year did ____ happen? Where was ____ born?) and no one was answering... because it's a lecture... because we're there to sit and listen as opposed to the tutes where we all participate. Then we were all told to stand up, and couldn't sit down until we'd each answered a question or volunteered a comment, and at that point I just left and went home. Maybe this is a common occurrence in smaller cohorts where 'lectures' are more like seminars where participation is encouraged, but in that context it just felt so puerile and pointless that I realised I wasn't just noticing small gripes and grievances anymore; I was simply not enjoying any part of the subject.

Tutorials:
Fortunately, there were a bunch of intelligent people in my tutorial who had some really interesting things to say about some of the texts we were studying. Unfortunately, most of the discussions ended up coming back to 'wow this text is really complicated and hard to read,' especially Ulysses - which again, I was so looking forward to discussing. We did that text for two or three weeks, and yet there was never any substantial conversation beyond the fact that the text was really long and difficult to get through. Granted, that's something that can be interesting to talk about with books like that, but it seemed like we were only ever dancing around the texts without ever addressing their core.

It was pretty much a standard English tutorial with most weeks being taken up by group discussions facilitated by the tutor and generally the same four or five people offering their contributions. Occasionally we'd be split into groups of two or three to talk about things and then report back, but I never found it particularly beneficial beyond some of the interesting tangents we'd go down when given the chance. Studying the same text over the course of two or three weeks could've been an opportunity for some carry-over discussions, but it ended up just making things seem all the more disjointed. For all the time we spent talking about superfluous stuff surrounding the texts, I don't recall anything substantial that linked the texts together, and certainly nothing that aided our understanding of what 'Modernism' and 'Avant Garde' were.

I'm also really not a fan of an attitude I've noticed crop up in more and more English subjects, and that is what I like to call the 'for those who read the book' caveat. You'd think that at a tertiary level, it's assumed (nay, required!?) that you read the texts that you're studying. And I know some of them were hard to get through, and that there were people doing this subject who had substantial amounts of reading to deal with in other courses, AND that there were some people who weren't even majoring in English that took this on a whim, but even so... for a fair amount of the tutorial discussions to begin with the tutor asking 'who read ____ for this week?' or 'how many of you managed to read the whole thing?' was kind of disheartening.

Assessment/ Feedback:
*aggressively rolls up sleeves*
At this point I think I should admit that if I had done this review at the end of Semester 1 after finishing the subject and not after Semester 2, my review would probably be more favourable. However, having done an English subject in this most recent semester that was really well run and interesting, I'm now inclined to look back on this one and be a tad harsher since I now know how good things could've been. So whilst I'll try and make this as objective as I can, I'm well aware that my opinions have been somewhat tainted by my having put this off and that this part of the review is going to be much more critical than it would have otherwise been.

There are only two essays for this subject, which I gather is the norm for 2nd and 3rd Year English subjects (give or take a tute presentation/ group exercise, etc.) and that means there's usually a 40/60 split in assessment weightings. Personally I think more frequent, less weighted assignments would be a better idea, especially because the word limits are kind of frustrating. Your whole grade comes down to 3500 words, the first 1500 of which are spent on a single text and a hugely broad essay question, most of which were about Modernism as a whole. *Note: I've since learned that you're better off writing your own essay topics in English subjects. Your writing will be more interesting and original, and it's way easier to showcase your knowledge when you pave your own focus.* The second 2000 words comprise a comparative piece which is also based on a generic 'Discuss >some concept< in relation to Modernism using two texts' kind of prompt. Unfortunately, the minimal assessment makes it really difficult to do well because for the first one, you have no way of knowing what kind of writing your tutor wants from you. To date, I've done six subjects in the English department, and every tutor I've had has told me at least one thing that has been contradicted by something another tutor has told me. Some of this advice has included:

• Don't have a quote in the final sentence of a body paragraph. // Quotes are fine wherever, so long as they're used well.
  
• When quoting the set text, just use the title once and then only use page numbers. // Have the author/title in your in-text citations every time.
  
  • Don't be too critical of a famous theory/theorist. // Critically engage with the theories/theorists and don't be afraid to disagree with them.
  • You should have more of other people's opinions than your own. // Your own contention is more important than other criticism.
  • You need at least four sources, and don't go into double digits. // No good essay was ever written that didn't cite at least 10 other essays.
  • Don't argue anything you can't support with textual evidence. // You should use the criticism to back yourself up; not the set text.
  • Paraphrase as much as possible to avoid over-citation. // Use direct quotes; paraphrasing is lazy and a form of covert plagarism.
  • Don't cite the author's other works or essays - develop your arguments independent from their intentions. // The author should be your primary source, not the text. Quote them instead of other theorists because they know what they're talking about.
  
  ... so you can see why it'd be frustrating to have 40% of your grade for a subject being a product of your own speculation as to what's expected. It got to the point where, because I was doing multiple English subjects at once, I'd spend a lot of time in tutes and lectures just writing down all the bits and pieces of advice I heard and made a game of matching them up by finding all the contradictions. I would love for there to be just a tiny, 5% or 10% piece of 1000 words or so due within the first two weeks where you could just to a bit of passage analysis, get some feedback, and then write your first major essay with a clearer understanding of some of your tutor's idiosyncrasies. As it stands, you just have to guess and hope you're lucky. The tutors aren't allowed to read drafts of your work (which is fair, I suppose, but still frustrating) and whenever I asked questions about criteria like the ones listed above, I'd get non-committal answers like 'Do whatever you think works' :/ - an admirably open approach to assessment, but if you're going to deduct marks because what I think works isn't what you think works, then it'd be nice to have a bit more guidance.
  
  That said, I did get lucky in this subject. We're never given numerical scores for reasons I'll go into later, but I got a H1 and nothing but positive comments. Still, I went to my tutor the lesson after we'd gotten the essays back and asked if there was anything in particular I should work on, or any potential weaknesses to avoid, and she said 'Nope, I'm really happy with where you're at; just keep doing what you're doing.' So I figured it was a fairly safe H1 and that I'd just have to replicate the same standard of writing next time. The 60% essay rolls around at the end of semester, and I submit a piece that is ostensibly the same calibre as the previous one - by my estimate, at least - and based on the comments, my tutor agreed with me. Again, I got nothing but positive feedback and compliments about my writing, and yet was given a low H1 for the subject overall.
  
  I don't want this review to come across as sheer bitterness over my mark because I'm aware it's still a good result and it isn't even having much of an effect on my GPA/WAM anyway, but before I get into the specifics of the numbers and scoring system, let me just have a pre-rant rant about how this reflects on the qualitative feedback itself. When I was in Year 8, I had an awesome English teacher who was a big fan of the 'pass it to the left' method of marking essays. We'd all get a chance to give one another feedback, and then read what our peers had provided for us, and to avoid some students simply writing 'It's good' or 'needs work; you total spud' he encouraged us to write what he called a 'Feedback Sandwich' where you say good things about their work at the start and end (like bread) and constructive criticism in the middle (like filler.) This stops people from feeling immediately upset when the first thing they read is a negative point, or when the last thing that sticks with them is about what they failed to do, but -AND THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART- it still gave us the opportunity to point out weaknesses and ways of improvement to the benefit of our writing as a whole. What I got doled out in this subject was like a loaf of sliced bread that had no substance and nothing beneficial in it... and only after eating it did I realise it was exceptionally mouldy.
  
  The mould in this metaphor is something that was told to me by a member of the department in a different English subject after someone asked about the marking process (ie. words to the effect of 'Do you purposefully give out a certain number of H1s, H2s etc. or do you just mark them objectively with no standardisation?') to which they replied 'oh no, we just give you all letter grades so that we can bell curve you later and change the marks around.' So that happened. And that kind of made me reevaluate my choices and is at least partially responsible for why I've abandoned the (mostly) rotten loaf of English and affixed myself to the beautifully constructed pastry tower of Linguistics, but it also explained a lot of the weirdness and numerical inconsistencies I'd heard about from my fellow Lit brethren but had previously dismissed as them being melodramatic or lying about their marks.
  In short, I can't recommend this subject, but I do believe it has the potential to be worthwhile if changes were made. There were some damn good books on the reading list, and I even enjoyed a lot of the secondary criticism which I normally don't, but tl;dr: I learned nothing from this, and it's not a great thing when a tertiary course makes one pine for the standards of a Year 8 English class.

Yes, but quality was iffy and were always slow to upload.

Sarah Balkin et al. Full disclosure- I stopped attending after about Week 4 :/

No exam for this subject

1.3/5

No textbook; texts studied were mainly anthologies or collections which means purchasing the exact copies was usually impossible unless you got them from the co-op, but everything in this course is in public domain and pretty well-known, so you could easily get by with online resources

1 x 90 minute lecture; 1 x 1 hour tute each week

2015, Semester 1

H1