| AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY | AMSA3L07 | 30 |
| This module examines the fascination of American literature with questions of selfhood, identity and autobiography. Opening sessions of the module will look at ways in which the very idea of America and its literature emerges from early-national attempts to 'write the self' and discuss changing theories of selfhood, identity and individuality as they are played out in America's historical development from colony, to nation, to postmodern superpower. Subsequent sessions will focus on specific texts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries which engage questions of selfhood in order to define, maintain and develop an idea of what being an American might mean. |
| AMERICAN DRAMA 1970-PRESENT | AMSA3L19 | 30 |
| This module will be concerned with exploring the work of American dramatists in the context of the social, political and cultural life of the country. In particular, it will give attention to the work of new women and African-American writers as well as to that of established dramatists. |
| AMERICAN GOTHIC | AMSA3L62 | 30 |
| American fiction began in the period of the European Gothic novel, which thus marked the American tradition from the first. In this seminar module we will establish the meaning of gothic conventions and consider their persisting effects in American fiction. |
| BIOGRAPHY | LDCE3X46 | 30 |
| How do writers attempt to capture 'life' in all its various forms? What, if any, are the different requirements in writing the life of a famous (or not so famous) person and that of a city or landscape? What about the 'life' of travel or food and how do you approach writing about the natural world? These are just some of the questions that this module sets out to address. We will be reading a wide variety of texts, from the 'traditional' biography to some of the more experimental examples of creative non-fiction. From Samuel Johnson to essays in The New Yorker, all human (and non-human) life will be there! Students may choose between writing their own piece of Biography or creative Non-Fiction as their final project or submitting a critical essay. |
| CHAUCER | LDCE3Y05 | 30 |
| This module explores Chaucer's major writings in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. The module will introduce Chaucer's writing in a range of genres and will examine his works' representation and exploration of society, identity, chivalry, politics, religion and gender, and will also consider the medieval reception of Chaucer's writing. Previous experience of medieval literature will be useful but is not required. |
| CHILDREN'S LITERATURE | LDCE3X67 | 30 |
| This module offers students the chance to learn about children's literature and its development and also to try to write a piece of children's literature themselves. It starts with the history of children's literature, looking at its use as a pedagogical tool, moving through fairy tales, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and their influence on the field, and examining other authors such as Charles Kingsley, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and Lemony Snicket. By studying the development of children's literature, this module also analyses the development of the concept of childhood in Western society. |
| DRAMA AND LITERATURE: THE QUESTION OF GENRE | LDCE3X06 | 30 |
| This seminar will explore the boundaries between drama and other genres (kinds, art-forms, media) in an attempt to investigate a number of interrelated theoretical questions. We shall explore these issues via various types of activity - practical criticism, critiques of literary theory, performance analysis, dramatising prose narrative. The set texts are works of literature which do not quite fit generically - particularly plays that seem to be in some sense 'epic', or novels in some sense 'theatrical', ranging from Shakespeare in the 17th century through to Gay and Fielding in the 18th and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov in the 19th. |
| EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA | LDCE3Y81 | 30 |
| This module focuses on the medieval and early sixteenth century period, exploring conceptions and deployments of drama. Comparative work of different forms of drama, the drama and other artistic media, and the drama and social attitudes will be encouraged. You will explore whether drama successfully produces civic unity; how audiences are addressed and constructed; the theatricality of how the Biblical past is imagined, the significance of staging, place, and gesture; the social and political functions of drama, the representation of women; and protests against the drama from various quarters. Our period ends just as the suburban professional theatre was establishing itself in London in a form that was fundamentally influenced by these much earlier dramatic activities. We shall explore how spectacle and ceremony enabled pre-Reformation communities to celebrate their existence and assert an often contested or otherwise problematic sense of their cultural identity. |
| FIN DE SIECLE: FANTASIES OF DECADENCE AND DEGENERATION | LDCE3X50 | 30 |
| Max Nordau's 1892 Degeneration, attacking fin de siecle decadence, draws together fears of cultural decline and corrupting artistic practice through pseudo-Darwinian thinking about devolution. Yet Nordau's urgent and apocalyptic claims about 'diseased' art draw an ambivalent response from contemporary writers, such as those associated with the aestheticism and decadence of The Yellow Book. It is within the fantastic, however, that Nordau is most directly confronted and social norms most explicitly deformed by art. Wilde's swift move from pedestal to pederast may remove a key figure, but texts such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; The Novel of the White Powder; Dracula; Wells' science fiction dystopias and, more recently, Moore and Campbell's From Hell, rehearse, react to, or reflect upon such concerns. These writings share a central tension: are the effects of decadence and degeneration offering pessimistic prophesy or optimistic alternatives? This module would complement nineteenth-century options and offer a perspective on the Modernist module. For students also taking the Gothic it would be related, although usefully focusing on the closing years of the nineteenth century with a different emphasis. |
| GENDER IN AMERICAN CULTURE | AMSA3S22 | 30 |
| The aim of this module is to think about democracy in the United States through a gendered lens. The Declaration of Independence declared that "all men were created free and equal", but throughout the history of the United States certain social groups have been denied their rights to citizenship and democracy. Therefore this module will be focusing upon the ways in which gender has been central to the construction of citizenship and democracy in the US. These concepts are critical elements in the formation of a modern American identity, and this module will provide a broader understanding of this distinctive feature of American history and society. |
| HENRY JAMES: QUESTIONS OF ART, LIFE AND THEORY | LDCE3Z42 | 30 |
| In this module students engage with the range of Henry James's writing and also the reproduction of his life and work in contemporary culture. This module aims not simply to add to understanding of James but also to explore the issues that his work raises in relation to the art and history of fiction, philosophy and cultural reproduction. It is suitable not only for literature students who want to study this writer who spans realism and modernism, and short stories, literary criticism and fiction, but also for creative writing students and literature and philosophy students. It can be taken by students who have studied modules in nineteenth-century writing or modernism. Reserved for students on course(s): Q300U1, Q300U2, Q200U1, Q201U1, Q3W8U1, QT37U1, QV31U1, W400U1, WQ43U1, VQ53U1, TQ73U1. |
| JOHN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST | LDCE3Y70 | 30 |
| Paradise Lost is perhaps the finest poem in the language. Its ambition is breathtaking: it begins before time, ends with time, spans the whole of the created universe, and yet focuses on a single, human relationship, on betrayal, recrimination and reconciliation. It is an attempt to explain the co-existence of evil and an omnipotent good God, a response to defeated political aspirations, and an attempt to create a republican poetics. In the module we will read the poem intensively, and seek to understand it in its historical context. Was there a republican aesthetic? How did writers respond to the collapse of radical political ideals and (comparative) religious toleration when 1660 brought the restoration of Charles II? How have literary historians participated in the occlusion of Britain's republican traditions? While there are no pre- or co-requisites, some knowledge of seventeenth-century literature or history, especially through LITE2Y13 Seventeenth-Century Writing, would be an advantage. |
| LITERATURE AND DECONSTRUCTION | LDCE3X87 | 30 |
| In an interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida describes literature as ���this strange institution which allows one to say everything���. This module explores the writings of Derrida and related thinkers alongside a range of literary texts, including works by Keats, Shakespeare and Joyce. Through a combination of lectures and seminars, we will think about the strangenesses of literature, look at the ways in which it is an ���institution��� and consider the kinds of freedom ��� of speech, writing and thinking ��� it permits. Our aim throughout will be to establish the possibilities for literary criticism opened up by deconstruction. The module is open to everyone, but may be of particular interest to those who studied critical theory in the second year. |
| LITERATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS | LDCE3X54 | 30 |
| Reading key philosophical, political, legal and literary texts, this module will track the emergence of human rights as a cultural idea from their conception in the eighteenth century, through to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and beyond in the period after World War Two. The module will address the following questions: What type of human being was presupposed by the declarations of rights? How did the novel help form perceptions about rights and human sympathy? In what ways did the UDHR re-imagine concepts of human rights after the Holocaust? How were these changes reflected in new forms of post-war writing, such as post-colonial and late modernist writing? How can we think about the relation between rights and literature today? This module will suit students who have enjoyed the challenges of philosophy and literary theory. It should also appeal to those who are interested in thinking seriously about the relationship between literature and its ‘real world’ applications and significance. |
| LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY | LDCE3X45 | 30 |
| This module explores the relations between literature and philosophy and differing understandings of the self, love and ethics through close reading of philosophical and literary texts. It is organised chronologically and moves from the classical writing of Plato to modern literature. The module designed for final year students who are studying Literature and Philosophy. It is also open only to students in Literature who have taken modules in Philosophy in years one and two; or by special concession at the discretion of the module organiser to other students who have substantial experience in both Honours level Literature and Honours level Philosophy. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (AUT) | LDCE3X15 | 30 |
| This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the unit organiser by the end of the previous semester. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: POST-1789 (SPR) | LDCE3X18 | 30 |
| This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period from 1830 to the present day (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (AUT) | LDCE3Y77 | 30 |
| This module is an advanced-level unit, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. |
| LITERATURE DISSERTATION: PRE-1789 (SPR) | LDCE3Y78 | 30 |
| This module is an advanced-level module, for final year students only. It provides students with the opportunity to write an 8000-word dissertation on literature of the period up to 1830 (excluding American literature). The dissertation topic must be agreed by a supervisor, and both topic and supervisor approved by the module organiser by the end of the previous semester. |
| MADNESS, MEDICINE, SCIENCE AND WOMEN'S WRITING IN THE REGENCY | LDCE3X75 | 30 |
| This module will study late 18th-century and early 19th-century writings in the context of scientific and medical innovation. We consider whether it may be appropriate to view the work of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley as a response to, and even a protest against these newly (or, more correctly, nearly) professionalised, male-dominated worlds. These women writers often concern themselves with the 'consumers' as well as the providers of the services offered by these professions; this module considers why that might be and how this kind of contextualisation might impact upon our readings of their work. |
| MARK TWAIN AND THE GILDED AGE | AMSA3L20 | 30 |
| According to William Faulkner, Mark Twain was ���the first truly American writer [���] the father of American literature.��� This module will test such paternity claims and examine their wider ramifications. We will explore Twain���s writing, his relationship to the Gilded Age, his contemporaries, and his influence on later American writers. As both author and man, Twain contained multitudes. Few writers have straddled so many genres and styles, and few Americans have embodied so many of the nation���s animating forces and tensions. He was, as his friend William Dean Howells felt, ���incomparable���, and this module is an opportunity for significant reading and research into his life, work and beyond. |
| MEDIEVAL ARTHURIAN TRADITIONS | LDCE3Y82 | 30 |
| From Welsh folklore to Monty Python, the tales of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have excited and intrigued generations. Why? To answer this question we explore the development of the legend from its twelfth-century Celtic roots through to a number of twentieth-century film adaptations. How the legend has been translated across form, genres, cultures and ages will be studied, including examples from Middle English Arthurian Texts, translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, of Monmouth's Latin chronicle and French romance texts. This module will enable students familiar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to enhance their awareness of the wider Arthurian traditions within which this text belongs, but is also suitable for students who are encountering medieval literature for the first time. |
| MIND, BODY AND LITERATURE | LDCE3X09 | 30 |
| The sense of loss in a Hardy poem, the parallel universe of a science fiction story, the sombre world of a Scandinavian crime novel: all have in common that they make the reader think, feel and possibly act. Drawing on an understanding of literature as writing which both engages and affects us, we look at a variety of literary texts (e.g, by Blake, Hardy, Lawrence, Hughes) and consider what they have in common with the everyday (clocks, teddy-bears, congregation ceremonies) and the bizarre (zombies, unicorns, ghosts). We consider how we understand text worlds, how metaphor relates to the body, whether real emotions can arise from fictional texts. Participants should have an open mind, a desire to understand literary theories, and a readiness to think outside the box. |
| MULTI-ETHNIC AMERICAN WRITING | AMSA3L12 | 30 |
| America has long been interpreted as the location of social possibility founded upon a desire to assimilate and negate ethnic 'others'. This module traces the literary responses of four distinct 'American' cultures: Native American; African American; Asian American; and Mexican American. Each group of texts engage with the specific historical, cultural and political relationships between the US and each author's country of origin or national/cultural history, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics will include race and racism, colonisation, imperialism, slavery, segregation, immigration, and illegality/invisibility, with an emphasis upon contemporary experiences. |
| NATIVE AMERICAN WRITING AND FILM | AMSA3S02 | 30 |
| This module considers Native American writing and film as sites of cultural and political resistance, analysing the ways in which a diverse range of Native authors, screenwriters and directors within the United States respond to contemporary tribal socio-economic and political conditions. Taking popular ideas of 'the Indian', this module considers the ways in which stereotypes and audience expectations are subverted and challenged. Topics include race and racism, indigeneity, identity, culture, gender, genre, land and notions of 'home', community, dialogue, postcolonial theory in its application to those who remain colonised, and political issues such as human rights and environmental racism. |
| NERVOUS NARRATIVES | LDCE3X83 | 30 |
| ‘We all say it’s nerves, and none of us knows what it means’, says a character in Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel, The Woman in White. Our aim is to think about how a discourse of the ‘nerves’ – the ‘nervous temperament’ and nervous illness – can be both so pervasive culturally and so slippery in its meaning. This interdisciplinary module takes you from the late 17th century, when the concept of ‘neurologie’ first emerged, to the 21st century, linking literary, medical and philosophical writing to explore the representation of the ‘nerves’. The historical range of the module is not meant to imply a transhistorical understanding of nervous illness or temperament, but rather will enable us to analyse the historically specific nature of the nervous body and what it is made to mean, culturally, within different contexts. In this way, we will be working with issues as diverse as religious ‘enthusiasm’, hysteria and hypochondria, sensibility, sensation, fear of modernity, manliness and effeminacy, shell-shock, PTSD and the concepts of the healthy or fragile body of the nation. Spanning time and genre, the literary texts studied will take us from the earliest, Jonathan Swift’s satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704) up to the contemporary: Siri Hustvedt’s novel, What I Loved (2003) and her analytical memoir, The Shaking Woman, Or, A History of My Nerves (2010). |
| NEW AMERICAN CENTURY: CULTURE AND CRISIS | AMSA3S1Y | 60 |
| A two semester special subject American Studies module that reads contemporary American culture through the lens of crisis. On the eve of the twenty-first century it appeared that the United States of America was indeed entering into a new American Century with its role as global leader as strongly defined as it was a century earlier. However, the last decade has been witness to a nation in turmoil and crisis, from the conflict between a universalising (Americanising) globalisation and an introspective nationalism; the war on terror and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq; environmental crisis and disaster; the conflict surrounding immigration and national identity, to the present financial crisis. The renewed and vigorous return to rhetoric of national ‘unity’ that characterised the campaign and election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2008 highlighted the historical divisions and crises of American society and underscored that contemporary America is in crisis geopolitically, economically, democratically, environmentally, and culturally. Indeed, Obama’s presidency has witnessed further polarisation of American politics and culture with the birth of the Tea Party Movement and the very recent Occupy Wall Street (now global) movement. Through a variety of cultural texts, from literature, film and documentary, political speeches and letters, to historical texts and pop culture, this course examines the ways in which these crises have been culturally and politically constructed and given particular sets of meaning and the ways in which these ‘meanings’ have been utilised and mobilised to further create ‘Fortress America’ and its particular brand of nationalism at the expense of all ‘others’, whether outside or inside the United States. The way culture has engaged with, coproduced, and resisted these sets of meanings will be the main focus of this module. |
| PLACE, RACE AND SPACE: AMERICAN MIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP | AMSA3S11 | 30 |
| This module will examine the contradictions of place-making, spatial mobility, and citizenship in the Americas by looking at the movement and settlement of immigrants and migrants since the 1870s. Although the concepts of place-making and spatial mobility appear to be contradictory, immigrants and migrants in their quest to find a home, move across regions, borders, and continents. Their ability to settle in certain places, depends on the economic and cultural conditions that prevail in the host locality and on the political-economic structure of the host society. Citizenship becomes an important variable in this process, because non-citizens are more vulnerable to social, political, and economic changes. |
| POETRY AFTER MODERNISM | LDCE3Z60 | 30 |
| This module will survey a wide range of post-war British poetry actively engaged with the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and others. Reading critical texts alongside poems, it will introduce students to lesser-known writers, such as the Welsh poet Lynette Roberts and the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, as well as considering well-known English poets such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes from a Modernist perspective. Recognising the influence of contemporary American verse on experimental poets such as J.H. Prynne and Paul Muldoon will also be an important theme. A chronological syllabus will take students from 1945 up to the present day, and there will be a chance to write creatively as well as critically as part of the assessment. Students wishing to take this module must have taken LDCE2Z15 Modernism. |
| POETRY OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY | LDCE3X71 | 30 |
| The poetry of the nineteenth century is often thought of as being caught between the two stools of Romanticism and Modernism. This module examines the development of poetry from Romanticism to Modernism, and asks in particular whether the poetry of the nineteenth century can claim our attention in its own right, rather than as a late avatar of Romanticism or as a foretaste of the excitements of Modernism. The focus of the module, then, is on close critical engagement with a large range of nineteenth century poetry and poetics, including the work of poet-critic Matthew Arnold, poet-priest Gerard M. Hopkins, and of other writers from Christina Rossetti to Algernon Charles Swinburne. Due notice will also be taken of nineteenth-century continental and American poetry. |
| QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY | LDCE3X58 | 30 |
| This module offers students the chance to learn about LGBTQ literature and its development in English-speaking countries, as well as approaches to queer theory. Authors studied will include Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Charlotte Mendelson, and Sarah Waters, as well as young adult novels by David La Rochelle, Alex Sanchez, Nancy Garden, Julie Anne Peters, and David Levithan. Using queer theory will also allow us to analyse literature from the perspective of gender and sexuality, and authors looked at will include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Teresa de Lauretis. Understanding how lgbtq characters are featured in literature also helps us to see how queer people are understood in a given society in general. |
| REGENCY WOMEN WRITERS | LDCE3X80 | 30 |
| This module situates the work of various women writers of the Regency period in literary and historical contexts. The main texts under discussion are by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Maria Edgeworth. The unit considers themes which - although not exclusive to women's writing at this time - occur strikingly frequently in the work of Regency women. These themes include sanity, madness and ideas about the mind, and literary devices such as the love-mad woman. Health, ill-health and the development of medicine are central to these fictions and the course, and we also discuss the figure of the doctor, the quack and the 'psychiatrist' in these texts. We look at writings by Regency women travellers whose destinations ranged from Italy to Bath, Sweden and Revolutionary France. |
| REVENGE TRAGEDY: ANCIENT AND MODERN | LDCE3Y86 | 30 |
| This seminar explores the different ways in which the concept of revenge has been conceived and represented in a range of dramatic texts. The module covers three distinct groups of primary materials: classical tragedy (in translation) including Aeschylus's Oresteia; early modern revenge tragedy including works by Shakespeare, Tourneur and Kyd; and modern cinematic explorations of the revenge formula including Get Carter, Old Boy and Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Topics discussed include the relationship between classical and Christian attitudes to revenge, contemporary strictures upon private vengeance, the representation of justice through the ages, the limitations of the revenge tragedy formula. |
| SATIRE | LDCE3X62 | 30 |
| ���Satire is problematic, open ended, essayistic, ambiguous in relation to history, uncertain in its political effects, resistant to final closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, ambivalent about the pleasures it offers��� (Dustin Griffin). The aim of this module is to investigate the problematic territory of satire. Using examples from modern and contemporary fiction and journalism alongside early modern and classical satire, we will formulate a critical and conceptual map, which will in turn allow us to discuss some of the problems of satire (those of genre, of gender, of politics, of morality, of history), and to explore some of the paradoxes of its strategies and functions (freedom versus limits; subversion versus conformity; transformation versus stasis). Writers under discussion will include Juvenal, Horace, Swift and Pope; John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague; Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, and Jonathan Coe. |
| SHAKESPEARE: SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE | LDCE3Y36 | 30 |
| Platonist epistemology permeated Elizabethan culture: the aim of this module is to explore the relationship of Shakespeare's topic of the world as a stage to Neoplatonic conceptions of perception, politics, poetry and love. |
| TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE | AMSA3L31 | 30 |
| This module examines American prose of the 1920s in the context of the Jazz Age. American literature of the 20s is often conflated with modernism, or the expatriate experience, or the Harlem Renaissance; this module will consider 1920s writing in the context of the market and the rise of professional authorship, anxieties about imitation and the middlebrow and conformism, and the pressures of commercial success on fiction. It will draw on reception studies and the influence of publication formats (mass-market magazines, serial publication, the burgeoning market for film adaptations). Texts will be drawn from a mix of “high” and “low.” After considering the pressures of commercialism on the publication of The Waste Land, texts could include the short stories of Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Babbitt, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Winesburg, Ohio, Glimpses of the Moon, and Manhattan Transfer. Students will also be expected to research journalism of the day, such as The New Yorker and the New York Times, which have accessible online archives. |
| THE AMERICAN BODY | AMSA3S30 | 30 |
| This module reads the changing values, presentations and representations of the body that move through and construct American culture. This module will involve pairing theoretical perspectives with current and historical ideas of the body to allow us to interrogate intellectual and popular meanings assigned to and played out through the body, reading particular moments in American writing, art, photography and popular forms for the things they might tell us about corporality and self presentation, but also about the wider structures of the social and cultural environment. We will engage with canonical debates about race, gender, sexuality and ideas of ���representation���, but also with categories that cut across and through these modes of reading ��� with the normal and the ideal, ideas of illness and wellness, ability and disability, of the organic and the machine, of the body under servitude, or under punishment, and with the whole idea of embodiment in itself. This module ��� like all other modules at this level - requires a substantial, regular, reading commitment. |
| THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL 1818-2000 | LDCE3Z09 | 30 |
| This module will examine the classic nineteenth-century 'Condition of 'England' novel alongside mid-to-late twentieth-century representations of England (and myths of national identity). Attention will be given to post-colonial writing as a significant part of the question: What is it to be English (or British)? |
| THE GOTHIC | LDCE3X41 | 30 |
| This module seeks to cover some 'canonical' texts of the Gothic Novel (1764-1820) in Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and to consider some later developments of the gothic mode in later 19th and 20th centuries: Poe, Le Fanu, Stevenson, MR James, Elizabeth Bowen, David Storey and Angela Carter. The course also seeks to introduce students to some of the theoretical and historical arguments around the contested nature of the term 'gothic', the Uncanny, the subversiveness or otherwise of this kind of writing, and its relation to the novel genre. |
| THE LITERARY 1960s | AMSA3L23 | 30 |
| When thinking of the sixties, literature, in general, is not what immediately springs to mind - pushed, as it is, to the background of music and the counterculture. Yet the decade brought about many profound changes in the paradigms of literature. Amongst such changes was the proliferation of metafiction as a narrative response to both the 'exhaustion' of literature in the light of the period's dramatic events, and to the new literary and philosophical developments in critical theory (poststructuralism). There was also the emergence of two 'new' genres: new journalism, and the non-fiction novel. This module is an examination of literary responses to the many changes and challenges brought about in this decade. It will discuss whether literature simply recoiled into solipsistic abstraction or whether it was a motivating force in the general struggle to conceptualize a ���new��� or countercultural American consciousness. |
| THE LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR ONE | LDCE3Z10 | 30 |
| The module will examine representations of World War One. As a Level 3 unit, the focus will be inter-disciplinary. Literary materials will be contextualised using historical and other sources. Use will also be made of memoirs, letters, diaries, and photographs. Students will be encouraged to conduct research using the internet and other facilities. |
| THE POETICS OF PLACE: POST 1945 AMERICAN POETRY AND ENVIRONMENT | AMSA3L24 | 30 |
| The American poet Charles Olson famously declared: ‘I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.’ This module explores how a range of linguistically innovative American poets, from 1945 to the present, have engaged this question of space and environment in their writings. There will be a particular focus on how scientific literature, natural history writing, field guides, and eco-criticism have contributed to poets’ theories of poetry and poetics as well as an emphasis on the role environmental notions of place and space play in forming and critiquing ideas of American identity. |
| THE RISING TIDE OF THE TRANSPACIFIC | AMSA3L35 | |
| This module considers the ways in which American literature has engaged with the opening up of Pacific space from the early nineteenth century to the present. From Melville���s adventures on whaling vessels throughout the Pacific, to Pearl Harbour and anxieties about Japanese presence in and beyond the borders of the United States, to writing by contemporary Asian-American authors whose work evinces influences from China, Korea and India, the texts on this course chart the ways in which the Pacific Ocean and its peoples have contributed to, created, and contested American national narratives. The module will develop students��� insights into issues of U.S. national history and cultural geography, and deepen their engagement with current theories of nationalism and transnationalism either in preparation for, or as a frame for reflection on, their studies abroad. |
| THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: NONSENSE AND MODERN WRITING | LDCE3X01 | 30 |
| It's widely recognised that modernist literature is characterised by a revolution of the word. Less widely recognised, and little explored, is the relationship between modernist linguistic experimentalism and literary nonsense, as practised by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and others. This course will begin with these well-known nonsense writers and explore their roots in earlier nonsense, including Shakespeare's, before going on to examine some of the adventures in language of major modernist and postmodernist writers. Authors studied are likely to include late Joyce, early Auden, Stein, Stevens, Cummings, Crane, Nabokov, Koch, Muldoon, Ashbery. The course will also set these avant-garde writers in the unfamiliar context of the mainstream fantasy writers who also come out of Carroll and the nonsense tradition, most likely Tolkien and Peake, whose imaginary worlds are based on their own invented languages. This is not a course on children's literature, but on some very challenging modern literature, though it should appeal to those who take a childish pleasure in wordplay and fantasy, and equally to those intrigued by philosophical issues around language. It would follow on very well from the second-year Modernism module. |
| TRAUMATURGIES: READING AND WRITING TRAUMA ACROSS CONTEXTS | LDCE3X91 | 30 |
| Trauma haunts the writing of the twentieth century. Slavery, war, patriarchy, terrorism, genocide, colonialism, modernity, technology and post-modernity: these legacies demand to be written and read, and engender a writing singular to their traumas. Yet the writing of these wounds, and the critical work that reads it, raises fundamental questions about whether trauma can ever be represented or understood. Spreading beyond their contexts, these questions effect their own traumas, cracking open our assumptions about what it is possible to read, to write, and indeed to think. Working roughly from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, this module reads a selection of theoretical, literary and critical texts that aim to write and read trauma across cultural, historical, personal and public contexts. |
| ULYSSES | LDCE3Z50 | 30 |
| This module will provide students with the opportunity to read one of the most famous, yet notoriously unread, novels of the twentieth century. The module has a number of aims. First, it will give students the time and opportunity to try to read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses. Secondly, the module will introduce students to some of the formal innovations typical of modernist writing through the close analysis of techniques such as interior monologue and mythic analogy. Thirdly, it will allow students to read a wide range of responses to Ulysses, both among Joyce's contemporaries, and in the history of twentieth century criticism. Fourthly, the module will situate the text historically, with a particular focus on the way that the text's obscenity affected its reception and circulation in the 1920s and 1930s. |
| VIRGIL'S CLASSIC EPIC | LDCE3Y18 | 30 |
| This module will explore the centrality of Virgil's Aeneid to Medieval and Renaissance culture. It will examine developing attitudes to the Classical literary legacy and accommodation and reinvention of Virgil's epic poem within new religious, political and literary contexts. The course will begin with exploration of Virgil's poem on its own terms before turning to reworkings of the 'Aeneid' by Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Douglas and Marlowe, the Renaissance invention of a 13th Book to 'complete' Virgil's poem, and the recasting of classical epic within the very different conventions of medieval and Renaissance romance. Previous experience of classical or medieval literature is not required. |
The writers of Britain and America are of course deeply connected: often they employ the same language, address the same readers, share the same cultural reference points. But at the same time, the two traditions differ sharply in their typical values and tones of voice. This programme allows you to experience these continuities and distinctions. Students on this programme have access to the courses that make up the degrees in English Literature and American and English Literature. The combination also means that you encounter the teaching of two different Schools: the interdisciplinary work of the School of American Studies, and the more literary focus of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing.
The School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing brings together writers, scholars, teachers and students in an exploration of the powers and possibilities of literature. Our aim is to make creative writing and critical reading confront one another in ways that sharpen and enliven both. We teach and research across the range of English Literature from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first. This coverage is supplemented by our interests in European Literature, in postcolonial writing in English across the world, and in literary and cultural theory.