Module Convenor: Dr Michael Meeuwis

What does it mean to narrate a garment, itself possessing a narrative, within a text? How do these narratives clothe us, and how do these narratives sell? We’ll start with theories of fashion drawn from the last two hundred years before considering three different case studies. Examples might include fashion in Victorian literature (Brontë, James, and Wilde), fashion in literature from and about postwar Britain (Spark, Selvon, and McInnes), garments in mythology from Sumerian myth to the present day, a study of runway collections inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novels Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway, an analysis of a particular designer’s work across a variety of international media, etcetera etcetera. Delivery will vary year to year in response to museum shows offered by regional institutions such as the Herbert Art Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Six lectures will furnish historical and visual context, allowing our focus to remain on close literary analysis. Economics will be a focus throughout: we’ll learn to be critical of fashion narratives, to engage with them emotionally, and to ponder them as career skills. This module should be of particular interest to students considering careers in fashion and other defining British industries—but will ultimately interest anyone with a mindful interest in how we narrate how humans get dressed.

Assessment:

Two papers, 40% each (second-year students 3,000 words, third-year 3,500 words)

One individual presentation on a garment in literature, 20%; presentations may be recorded in advance to be shown in class. Students with concerns about presentations are encouraged to contact the instructor. Just to note, and unlike in previous years, students without a medical exemption must present in class, in observance of institutional assessment policies.

 I've used ebooks wherever possible. Not available as ebooks are the Barthes (truly truly essential), Proust, McKay, Hughes, Larsen, Baldwin, and Hval. These are all available on second-hand sites--I'd encourage you to shop there first. Any edition of a book written initially in English is fine. Make sure you have the Lydia Davis translation of the Proust.

29.05.24: the syllabus is finalised! Talis-Aspire should be online shortly. I would strongly suggest reading "Pamela" and the Proust section indicated over the summer.

Term one: systems

First Paper Prompt (revised 25 Oct)

1: theories – economics T1W1 Handout	Gogol, "The Overcoat"	Karl Marx, Commodity Fetishism Peter Stallybras, "Marx's Coat" Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life" Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, "Baudelaire, Gautier, and the Origins of Fashion in Modernity"
2: theories – gender and the fashion system PowerPoint HandoutLink opens in a new window	Virginia Woolf, "The New Dress"	Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, all chapters except for chapters 5 and the Stafford Afterword Kadji Amin, "We Are All Nonbinary"
3: theories - desire and modernity PowerPoint Handout		Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage" J. Entwistle, "Addressing the Body," in Fashion Theory: A Reader Lehmann, Tigersprung, "Benjamin and the Revolution of Fashion in Modernity"
4: theories - textiles PowerPoint Handout	Thackeray, Vanity Fair, chapter 4, "The Green Silk Purse"	Fashion Theory: A Reader section 1 (Vinken and Bourdieu) and section 2 (Simmel, Sapir, Davis) Sukanya Banerjee, "Ecologies of Cotton" Lisa Lowe, "A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities"
5: theories - stuff and things PowerPoint Handout	The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760)	Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, "Introduction" Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, "The Force of Things" and "The Agency of Assemblages" Derrida, "Injunctions of Marx," in Specters of Marx
6:
7: Eighteenth-century Fashion Cultures PowerPoint Handout	Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740)
8: Eighteenth-century Fashion Cultures Handout PowerPoint	Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740)	Chloe Smith, "Introduction" and "Making the Four Corners of the Globe," in Novels, Needleworks, and Empire
9: Eighteenth-century Fashion Cultures	Francis Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little (1751)	Fashion Plates assignment
10: Fashion Cultures of High Modernism	Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)	Georges Bataille, "The Gift of Rivalry: Potlatch," from The Accursed Share

Term two: cases and scenes

1: Fashion Cultures of High Modernism	James Joyce, Dubliners (1914)
2: Fashion Cultures of High Modernism	T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
3: Fashion Cultures of High Modernism	Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann's, "Combray I" (1917)	Henri Bergson, from Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, section collected as 'The Idea of Duration' in Henri Bergson, Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (Continuum, 2002)
4: Harlem Renaissance	Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928)	Metropolitan Museum Harlem is Everywhere podcast, "Portraiture & Fashion"
5: Harlem Renaissance	Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926)	Krystal Smalls, "Race, Signs, and the Body," in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race
6:
7: Harlem Renaissance	Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
8: Queer Subcultures PowerPoint Handout	James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (1956)	Dick Hebdige, Subculture: "Introduction: The Meaning of Style"; "Ideology: a lived relation"
9: Queer Subcultures Handout	Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (1993)	Derek Guy, "Straight Copying: How Gay Fashion Goes Mainstream"
10: Queer Subcultures	Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot (2018)