English Literature

It is a truism that the Renaissance was a period in which texts were all produced following religious guidance, and that in the Enlightenment, all such certainty of knowledge was replaced by the spirit of free experimentation and thought. This module will address these two periods through their literary products, from the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to the novels and poems of the writers of the eighteenth century, linking the changing literary forms with the changes in the way knowledge was understood. The underlying question to be answered by the module is why the period begins with drama and ends with the novels of Jane Austen.

This study ranges across two – perhaps arguably three – generations of Romantic writers and artists in the ‘long Romantic century’ from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This epoch is approached for the interest of its works and materials in their own terms as well as constituting a sort of forcing ground for theories and methods in literary studies linked to that form of modernity which springs to life from truly epochal transformations – the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and, in the arts and sciences, the ‘end of patronage’. Navigation of this terrain is by means of reference to both canonical and non-canonical texts in English poetry. The material is multi-generic, too, so that both prose fiction and non-fiction find their place here as well: with Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, William Hazlitt and others. The general problem of canon formation is indeed engaged in this work through the virtual case study that is the changing face of Romantic literature in academic study today. 

In Term one, this module focuses on the period between 1910 and the late 1950s, when a darkening world view ushered in by the First World War and plunged further into shadow with the rise of C20 fascism, witnessed the birth of ‘modernism’. The modernists produced work unlike any other age, work often regarded as ‘difficult’, with narrative innovations including the ‘stream of consciousness’. Following some context, the module considers these innovations via a range of literary and cultural texts, including poetry, plays, novels and cinema. In Term two, we turn to the ‘postmodern’ age, from its beginnings in the 1960s through to its heyday in the 1980s to, finally, the so-called ‘new sincerity’ of the 21st century. We will explore how postmodern texts reject grand narratives, embrace the multiple, mobile and fragmentary nature of contemporary life, and thus resist easy categorisation. This module, then, explores the complexity of postmodernism through its (often contested) relationship to ‘modernism’.

In semester one, students can choose from:

Victorian Literature - 15 credits
A range of Victorian texts is engaged here, in a survey that brings not just fiction, but also verse and the drama into focus among the primary references. As a starting point, the study takes up with Matthew Sweet’s archly provocative ‘Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong’ (Inventing the Victorians (2001)). This then facilitates engagement with the key question ‘what it means to be Victorian’, drawing on contemporary representation (‘contemporary’, that is, with the Victorians as well as with us). Works are encompassed from such familiar and perhaps not-so- familiar literary names as the following: the Brontës, the Brownings, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde. This then is an opportunity to reconsider ‘the Victorians’ from their literature, noting how it has been these same Victorians whom subsequent generations have defined or measured themselves against, in a long history of Britain’s rise and fall as a modern-imperial world-power.

OR

Children's Literature and Young Adult Fiction - 15 credits
Literature written for children and young adults is the foundation of our knowledge of our culture and our world. It is therefore surprising that until recently it has been largely excluded from serious academic study and treated as unimportant by the academy. This module will offer a brief survey of the millions of books written for children and young adults from the small beginnings of the mythical father of children’s literature – John Newbery – to the phenomenon of literary and financial success that is J.K. Rowling. Is children’s and young adult’s literature educational? Is it soap opera? Is it escapist? Is it polemic? Is it dangerous? And what exactly is a child? How old is a young adult?

In semester two, students can choose from:

Literature and the Body - 15 credits
The use of the body as a theoretical tool for analysing literature developed out of Feminism and Gender Studies and began under the banner of Literary Theory focusing on the body and its political resistance to heteronormativity. To some, Body Theory became clogged by its own methodology which became predictive rather than evaluative. The study of the body in literature has therefore bifurcated into a double focus on theory and the contextual, the latter being an exploration of the ways the body intersects with society and politics. Is it a right to express oneself as one wishes? Are certain forms of self-presentation unacceptable in certain (or all) periods of history, and if so why? The module will explore the roots of the link between the body and texts which confront the body in its discussion with society and politics.

OR

Gothic Literature - 15 credits
This study engages with the emerging phenomenon of global Gothic. To trace the trajectory of Gothic ‘going Global’ critical analysis is brought into play in relation to the origins, development and spread of this influential modern-medievalist literary mode. The Gothic’s origins in the counter-Enlightenment of early Romanticism are located with reference to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the first literary work (in its 1765 second edition) to refer to itself as a ‘Gothic Story’. The Gothic’s development is traced through such key interventions as those from Ann Radcliffe in Britain and Edgar Allan Poe in America. Its spread is traced through its diffusion in a range of national and international cultures, as well as its expansion beyond the borders of purely literary expression (notably in twentieth-century film and after). It is then Gothic culture as a global phenomenon (in literature, film, architecture, fashion, food, heritage and so on), which is ultimately grasped with this work, a phenomenon, that is, heralded as early as 1974 by Angela Carter who remarked ‘We live in Gothic times’ (Afterword to Carter’s Fireworks). 

The dissertation is an extended treatment of between 8,000 and 10,000 words on a subject of the student’s choice (subject to approval). Study is primarily student-directed, with supervision supplied by tutors teaching/researching in the subject area. Students will draw on a small number of general lectures to further provide guidance through the process, but this is primarily a self-directed, independent study.

Society from 1800 to the present might be argued to have been marked by fantastic advances in concepts about what technology can do and concomitantly, writers might be argued to have created fantasies that explored other worlds that were both more fantastic and more technological, or less technical and sometimes barbaric, to explain current developments to readers who were confused or alienated by the social changes they encountered. What these stories have in common is that though the other worlds are apparently beyond experience, the philosophies that underlie them explore (among many other things) real world debates about the religious and the scientific, the nature of conflict, and aspects of health and wellbeing. Fantasy fiction also spawned other media forms like comics, art, film, games and graphic fictions. This module will also question and discuss how literary these “new media” versions of other world fantasies might be.

In the second Term, students will engage with utopian and dystopian texts – the line between which is often blurry – across a range of cultural forms. Focusing primarily on literary responses to these ‘grand’ themes, we will also consider other forms such as film, television, and videogames, challenging students to develop an interdisciplinary approach to their work. Students will engage with key utopian theorists such as Plato, Jameson, Moylan, Baccolini, Sargent, Sontag, and Dyer as a means to help guide their interrogation of the spaces between utopia, dystopia, and anti-utopia. Students will learn to debate how key frameworks such as gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and ideology function in utopian and dystopian fiction. They will also use their knowledge of these approaches, built up during their studies, in order to deconstruct the operations of utopia and dystopia and to find patterns in the construction of these ‘other’ types of world.

Literature and Film - 30 credits
This module uses the relationship between American literature and film as fertile ground to consider two central ideas about the scope and function of American culture. Firstly, the idea that American culture promises to provide access to some extra-social realm, often called 'authentic,' visionary, or transformative but that this often sits in tension with its commodified nature and secondly that: American culture plays an important role in struggles over identity - as potentially liberating and transformative, or as constraining and reinforcing hierarchies of power.

The module also uses extensive examples from the movies of Alfred Hitchcock to illustrate the processes involved in adapting literature into film while applying these lessons to readings of key American texts through the 20th and 21st centuries. These texts allow for a period driven examination of American ideas about identity against relevant cultural and socio-political events to encourage students to pay particularly close attention to both modes and moments of production.

Consuming Pleasures - 30 credits
This work addresses the development in tandem of consumer culture and an erotics of literature through amorous fiction. Historically, it takes up with the eclipse of shopping arcades with the rise of department stores, notably in Paris (‘capital’, in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘of the nineteenth century’). But if the early French department stores are in fact modelled on London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, it is worth cross-referencing the spread at roughly the same time of serial fiction, earlier trailblazed by Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and, later, the Victorian penny dreadfuls. This is to note a critical inter- twining of consumer culture and amorous fiction in modernity’s signature blurring of phantasy and reality – in, that is, the ‘pornography of representation’ (Susanne Kappeler’s phrase). Here, consumer culture texts and forms of amorous fiction are interleaved, correspondingly, to analyse the symbolic reciprocal action of each on the other, a key exchange. Among the references, therefore, are Émile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames – The Ladies’ Paradise – as the first ever department store novel and Sophie Kinsella’s later contribution to chick lit, Confessions of a Shopaholic, as well as selections from Mariella Frostrup and Jamie Maclean’s 2016 Desire anthology, featuring amorous fiction from the Marquis de Sade to Anaïs Nin to Angela Carter. Please note: there is frequent explicit material in the amorous fiction in this study, necessarily to locate this work at the sharp end of research into a crossover world of commodity poetics and consuming pleasures.

Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century - 15 credits
The module will explore women’s writing of the long eighteenth century following the two current trends in this most exciting area of critical study: women as political commentators, and women as philosophers of the emotions. Both of these ways of understanding women’s writing required that a writer had a wide ranging knowledge of classical techniques, an indication which has now led to serious study of the huge outpouring of texts by women, that has replaced former methodologies of reading that were based on the idea that women were uneducated (Ian Watt), and had a short attention span (John Richetti), so produced texts that were merely entertainment. But nor will this be an unreconstructed feminist approach to these writers. Women writers in the eighteenth century were not merely opposing patriarchy, they were writing about everything and anything they though interesting – just as women do today

Tales from the Inside - 15 credits
This module examines writing and cultural texts classifiable as ‘prison literature’ or ‘carceral texts’. Students will examine cultural representations of ‘carceral institutions’ and the issues raised by them utilising critical and literary theory. Study frameworks will include: historical context (from BCE to the present); global contexts (the U.S., the U.K., China, Russia, and elsewhere); political and legal contexts (national and international laws, treaties, and jurisprudence on prisoners’ rights); and institutional variation (potentially including, but not limited to, men’s and women’s prisons, the ‘prison industrial complex’ and ‘carceral state’, secure psychiatric facilities, and other examples). The module will explore debates around what constitutes ‘prison literature’ as a genre, including questions of authorship and authenticity, readerly appeal, and adaptability across a variety of literary forms. In addition to this, the module will also consider both the power and limitations of various kinds of prison literature to inform and inspire change in prisons.

Globalisation and Contemporary Fiction - 15 credits
This module surveys literary (and some filmic) texts that have globalisation as a theme and asks how far these fictional accounts offer us a coherent definition of globalisation. Throughout this module we will consider depictions of international migration, new communicative-technologies, global economics, environmentalism, transnational corporations, global labour, and terror. We will consider whether the fictional representations of these phenomena suggest particular ways of thinking about the global and ask whether this improves our understanding of globalisation as lived experience. During this module you will be asked to think about how the depictions of global phenomena within fictional texts compare with the presentation of globalisation in political discourse and to consider how far fictional accounts of globalisation clarify the diverse and contradictory meanings for the term globalisation in daily use.

Literature and Psychoanalysis - 15 credits
‘The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious,’ Freud once admitted. ‘What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.’ This dichotomy—between the literary and the scientific—is at the heart of this module. After all, Freud’s ‘scientific’ theories were supplemented by his own readings of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Hoffmann. Hence, this is a module as much about ‘reading psychoanalysis’ as much as it is about psychoanalysing reading. It proceeds from a deepening of the student’s understanding of psychoanalysis in Critical Theory by treating Freud alongside key influences (Charcot, Breuer) and followers (Jones, Rank); those who succeeded him (Klein, Anna Freud) and who broke from his influence (Jung). It will complement this with a consideration of Lacan’s infamous ‘return to Freud’ as the basis for several key feminist (Irigaray) and philosophical interventions in the late 20th century.