MA Literary Studies: Pathway in American Literature & Culture

This core module for the ‘Comparative Literature & Criticism’ pathway of the MA in Comparative Literary Studies will introduce you to the main concepts of comparative literary theory and practice and its principal debates, complementing these with textual analyses and the opportunity to engage in comparative readings. We will examine key aspects of the development of the discipline of “comparative literature”, and study the theoretical frameworks elaborated to describe the ways texts relate to, derive from, or influence other texts (such as influence, imitation and intertextuality, translation, and reception). Historical relationships and how these are constructed will be examined, focussing on the idea of tradition, the concept of the canon and its revisions, as well as the importance of literary history in our understanding of literature.

The literary texts and films studied will enable you to study “in action” central concepts of comparative critical practice, focussing for instance on genre; topoi; thematic approaches; textual rewritings; “translations” of texts to different genres (e.g. poetry to prose) or media (e.g. written text to film).

The module will ask questions such as: what happens to a text and its meaning when it is adapted to or referenced in a new geographical, historical, or social context? What does this mean for the concept of meaning itself? What is the relationship between genre, theme and story? Between a historically situated national identity and the crossing of linguistic, cultural and historical boundaries?

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

This core module for the pathway in ‘Modern Literary Theory’ surveys key currents in literary and cultural theory from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Beginning with the examination of shifting ideas and theories of the ‘literary’ in the module of the discipline’s development, it goes on to explore ten key thinkers and tendencies, starting with Nietzsche. These will include Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin and Adorno, Structuralism, Blanchot, Derrida, Gender and Postcolonial Theory. Although the question of the relationship of theory to literary and cultural criticism is a central one, the module will enable you to focus on theoretical concepts in their own right. You will also be asked to consider the theoretical implications of the particular formal and stylistic choices made by the thinkers covered.

This core module for the pathway in ‘Modern Literature’ surveys the most internationally significant trends, influences, and movements in European and American literature of the twentieth century (and potentially beyond), including the impacts of Bergson and Nietzsche, the ‘prophetic’ role of the modern poet, challenges to Realism, the schools of Expressionism, Surrealism, and Absurdism, the modernist disruption of literary conventions, aspects of writing on the Holocaust, and the emergence of poststructuralism, OULIPO and postmodernism. These developments are studied through the analysis of major representative texts either in English (e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses) or in English translation (e.g. Gide’s L’Immoraliste) within their relevant cultural contexts. We will read works by James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, Bertolt Brecht, W.H. Auden, Walter Benjamin, William Faulkner, Primo Levi, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Virginia Woolf.

Teaching Mode: Weekly lecture followed by 2-hour seminar.

This core module for the pathway in Literature of the Caribbean & its Diasporas intensively surveys Caribbean and diaspora literatures to highlight significant movements relative to the social, political and historical contexts impacting upon these new literatures. We are interested to trace the developments within the forms of literary and artistic expression examined, to show how literary texts, forms and genres veered between consolidation and experimentation from beginnings marked by the slave narrative, a preoccupation with history and memory and a close affinity with the aural/ oral, and to further explore some of the determining forces which underpinned the transformations of the literatures. We seek to trace the influence, and textual embodiment of intellectual and cultural developments in the region’s literature and that of its diaspora including the impacts of Colonialism, post-Colonialism, Negritude, and Globalisation. These developments are studied through the analysis of representative texts either in English (e.g. Walcott’s Omeros) or in English translation (e.g. Condé’s Windward Heights)

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

This core module for the 'Romantic and Victorian Literature and Culture' pathway of the MA in Comparative Literary Studies examines the current debate in nineteenth-century studies about connections between Romantic and Victorian literature and the persistence of a Romantic tradition throughout the century.

During this module, you'll be able to develop your interests in two key literary periods and to question the usefulness of traditional periodisation. In each seminar we will compare texts from both periods on the basis of genre and theme, and examine the ways in which individual texts relate to, derive from, or influence other texts. We will study the intense reactions to the deaths of the Romantic poets in the 1820s, shaping the early careers of writers who would later be read as Victorian; responses to the textual and material relics of the Romantic poets as a cliché of Victorian tourism; Wordsworth’s insistence on portraying simple people and rural life, and his influence on the novels of Eliot and Hardy; a revolution in literary language; gender and class identities and conflicts; versions of social and political radicalism in the wake of the French Revolution; publication in a changing literary marketplace; popular genres such as Gothic and sensation fiction.

A consideration of the figure of the poet will involve conflicting notions of engagement with contemporary society and the need for solitary reflection; the emergence of innovative poetic forms such as the dramatic monologue and a new kind of epic; literary representations of individual psychology and an increasing fascination with extreme mental states. We will examine the impact of scientific discoveries and philosophical and religious discourses on literary culture. We will relate English literature to its global context, exploring conceptions of nationalism and democracy in relation to cosmopolitanism, the construction of Europe in the nineteenth century, philhellenism, Orientalism and imperialism.

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

This module looks at the role and development of major early modern thinkers and writers within the context of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Drawing on a range of philosophy, literature, religious writing and political thought, we explore the ways in which Shakespeare stages some of the major concerns of his day within the context of intellectual innovations across Europe c1400-1600.

This module will examine the relationship between narrative and sexual identity through focusing on a variety of narrative structures and their relationship to late 19th- and 20th-century constructions of selfhood and sexuality. We will examine genres such as the case study, autobiography, confession, the novel and poetry to test the hypothesis that modern sexual identity is produced by the imperative to “tell the truth of sex”. In addition to Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Fanon, Foucault and Butler, we will examine a selection of texts, which will be chosen with reference to students’ particular interests but which might include Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich or Jean Genet.

Why is it that literature has held such insistent fascination for modern philosophers? What is at stake for philosophy in the fact that literature exists? Is the strict Platonic separation of literature from philosophy still tenable? By focusing on a number of seminal modern European philosophical texts on literature, this module will seek to explore these questions from a number of different perspectives. In particular, it will show how this preoccupation with literature is the consequence of modern philosophy’s ongoing interrogation of its own limits. Philosophers to be studied include Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot.

This module will explore the varied voices of poetry in the United States from 1940 to the present. In its survey of distinctively American styles, it will also consider notable works of 'confessional' poetry, the New York school, the position of women poets, the thematics of history, and critical definitions of Americanness in poetry. Poets to be studied will include Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Mark Strand, and Charles Simic.

This module focuses on the importance of the documentary photo-text within 20th-century American photography and writing. The module traces the generic, political and aesthetic intersections in photo-textual collaborations, between writers and photographers, journalism and fiction, and how documentary writing was influenced by and participated in the theorisation of photography.

We will discuss - amongst other things - various ideas on the ontological nature of the photograph, the idea of documentarism and its status as a mimetic form of representation as well as an art-form, the issue of propaganda, representations of America in terms of iconographies, ideologies - both left and right-wing - and the fascination with the vernacular during the Depression Era and through to the Cold War. The aim is to simultaneously link these broad ideas with in-depth analysis of particular photo-texts. The module will therefore enable you to articulate the intersections between politics and aesthetics in the pre- and post-war period, the concept of the photo-text as a genre particular to the period, and in the process query the relevance of a photographic aesthetic as a modernist concept.

'In what sense is psychoanalysis a theory of love?'. By way of close readings in his key texts on the subject, this module will explore how the enigma of love structures (and destabilises) Freud's model of the mind. As well as addressing classical Freudian questions such as the neuroses, transference, the drive, masochism and femininity, the module will examine the implications of the psychoanalytic model of love for theories of reading and interpretation. In what sense is love 'textual' as well as sexual? As well as focusing such issues through Freud, we will point to the various directions in post-Freudian psychoanalysis to which our chosen texts lead.

Paying close attention to the relation between form, aesthetics and context, this module will question whether the 21st century marks a break, shift or radical departure from the preoccupations of late 20th-century American fiction. For example, has postmodernism been superseded, and, if so, by what? Are new cultural (literary) forms needed in the attempt to map more recent (globalising) shifts in capitalism and their social and cultural formations? Is the American fiction of the 21st century defined by other, more dramatic shifts that rupture the cultural and social fabric? In other words, the module will ask to what extent recent fiction can be considered post-traumatic or post-catastrophic after the events of 9/11.

On a similar note, this module will investigate whether the late 20th century’s obsession with memory and trauma is still registered in more recent fiction, and whether the act of witnessing trauma, directly or indirectly, still constitutes the public sphere. Where terrorism and a “war on terror” have drawn attention to American borders and their perceived permeability, this module wonders whether concepts of national identity are still valid or whether the 21st century has illuminated once again the global and transnational contexts in which American identity has been written. Moving from the transnational to the national to the particular, this module wonders whether performative concepts of race, gender, sexuality and class still have a purchase on the new century’s fiction and its writing of the 21st-century American body.

‘Palestine’ has become one of the most potent cultural/political signifiers of our time. This module aims to unpack some of its complex histories and meanings, with a view to understanding why it plays such a central role in contemporary debates about ‘Islamic radicalism’, neo-colonialism/globalisation, the decline of the West, human rights and ‘terrorism’. In doing so, it seeks to remedy a signal oversight in mainstream postcolonial studies, which has historically evaded any serious engagement with ‘Palestine’. These issues will be approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion, drawing on literary and cultural studies, politics, religious studies, trauma studies, film studies, history and ethnography. Particular attention will be paid to how cultural representation mediates relationships of power and ideology; and the role and effects of different styles, genres and modes of representation (fiction, memoir, graphic novel, film, poetry etc) in such mediations.

Please note: this is an experimental module and some of the texts will be less readily available than on comparable options. Students must be prepared to use internet sites like Amazon and AbeBooks to source out-of-print material, although every effort will be made to provide some stocks of each text in the library.

This comparative and interdisciplinary module explores the relationship between literature and the visual arts in Europe in the late 19^th century. Beginning with cultural-historical contexts and definitions of terms, we will study the closely-related movements of Romanticism, Aestheticism, Decadence, and Symbolism, and the decadent preoccupation with neuroses, obsessions, dreams, artifice, intense sensation, sensuality, perverse sexuality, parody and crime. The English and French traditions will be our principal focus, but we will consider the phenomenon of Decadence in a range of fin-de-siècle productions, including Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), Joris-Karl Huysmans’ AgainstNature (1884), Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (1898), The Yellow Book and The Savoy magazine, selections of New Woman writing, Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1893), Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ (1895), Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and his tragic drama, Salome (1893). We will study literary texts alongside expressions of visual Decadence (in week 4 students will make an independent field trip to a gallery or museum), and these will include the work of painters, illustrators and poster artists, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Fernand Khnopff, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Kubin, among others.  Knowledge of French, though useful, is not a prerequisite for this module.

Much of the most significant and powerful contemporary fiction in English is written by those who come, or whose families have come, from outside the metropolitan and erstwhile imperial centre. This fiction is often called ‘postcolonial’, though there are those who would debate that term, as many do all aspects of the body of theory about the relation of the West and the rest of the world that has come to be known as ‘postcolonial theory’. Some would prefer the term ‘world’ or ‘transnational’ literature, for reasons we will discuss. This option divides its attention between the analysis of postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory. Theorists to be studied will include Fanon, Said, Spivak, Ahmad and McClintock, along with a variety of writers such as Lessing, Achebe, Rhys, Rushdie and Coetzee.

Romantic writers, such as Coleridge, Hazlitt, Byron, Schiller, A. W. Schlegel, and Percy and Mary Shelley, were all obsessed with Shakespeare. His plays, his poetry and his mind were persistent objects of discussion and speculation among these later writers, who also quoted his words, sometimes obviously, sometimes subtly, in their other writings.

Yet this common preoccupation with Shakespeare often took the form of violent disagreement and competition. This module investigates, mainly within British literary culture, the nature and extent of the Romantic obsession with finding, keeping, improving, vandalising, copying and using Shakespeare, his meaning and his power.

To that end, the module pursues three lines of inquiry: first, it focuses on a small selection of Shakespeare’s plays and considers how different Romantic writers regard each one, in the literary and theatrical criticism that they devote to that play and to contemporary productions of it; secondly, the module examines a small selection of plays composed by Romantic writers themselves in response to Shakespeare’s plays; thirdly, it investigates how Shakespeare’s work was presented by earlier editors and theatre practitioners in the eighteenth century to the Romantics, and how the Romantics have in turn conveyed Shakespeare’s work to us, as we read it in seminars and watch it at The Globe Theatre and in Hollywood movies.

Other issues that will be addressed along the way are the historical development of literary and dramatic criticism itself, the agency of women in literary culture, and literature as a tool in the education of children.

In the era in which human activity, particularly fossil-fuel use and its effects, has become the main determinant in shaping the environment – an era which has been labelled the ‘Anthropocene’ – a growing body of literary work has emerged that seeks to explore the inextricability of social and natural damage and devastation.

This module considers the engagement of contemporary American fiction with a range of environmental crises, from climate change to pollution to ecological collapse. Generally speaking, the module asks what cognitive, interpretive and aesthetic resources are offered by the contemporary American novel in understanding such crises and catastrophes and in what ways has fiction evolved and adapted to capture this subject matter.

More particularly, the module asks how fiction might generate affective and politically transformative forms of public knowledge in the face of widespread dissociation of the consequences of a fossil-fuelled modernity, and, relatedly, how fiction might understand the social causes of natural disasters; how literature can chart or remember the geopolitical histories of energy supply and resource capitalism – histories that might include war, terrorism and pollution – that are normally forgotten at the point of Western consumption; how literature can encompass both the global scale and local impact of climate change and environmental degradation, as well as forge a sense of (eco)cosmopolitan solidarity between variously affected societies; how narrative can adapt to the subject matter of the ‘slow violence’ of pollution, contamination and man-made ‘natural’ disasters, and to the precarious and at-risk subjectivities produced by such violence; what kind of politics and ethics arise from such representations and how might literature engage with questions of environmental justice; and, in terms of worse-case scenarios, how literature imagines apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios of a world of spent resources and barely sustainable life.

‘Interculturality, Text, Poetics’ explores interpretative theories of interculturality including creolisation, poetics of relation, postcolonialism and carnivalisation in relation to Black British and Caribbean poetics, performativity and discourses such as humanism and globalisation.

We interrogate questions concerning what is literature and what meanings might be revealed by the ‘emergence’ of Black British and Caribbean literature mainly in the twentieth century. We consider the challenges of writing across histories and cultures in order to articulate a profoundly interconnected world and possibilities other than the nation. We examine how oral and literary texts, forms and genres within this body of writing through consolidation and experimentation, illustrate distinctive features of interculturality and syncretism. We investigate some of the determining forces underpinning the aesthetics of the texts.

As one of two core compulsory modules within the MA Black British Writing programme, the module intensively surveys Black British Writing since the late eighteen century to highlight the nature of its ‘relation’ to the social, political and intellectual contexts in which it was written. We consider the emergent literature primarily as a body of relational texts communicating across and between cultures and diversities. This writing, sometimes defined by its transnational location, problematizes questions of nation, the political, identity, critical theories and literature itself.

‘Interculturality Text Poetics’ applies to the texts a range of critical and theoretical perspectives including diasporic criticism and Glissant’s poetics of relation in order to undertake readings of the selected texts alongside other texts for the purposes of rigorous critical enquiry that complements in its emphases the ‘Historicising’ core module. For example, Equiano’s ‘Interesting Narrative’ may be read alongside Eze’s Race and the Enlightenment. Similarly, Sunmonu’s Cherish may be read in tandem with ‘Queen Victoria’s Black Daughter’ in Gerzina’s Black Victorians, Black Victoriana.

Elizabethan creative artists—whether writers, musicians, builders, dancers, painters, embroiderers, or workers in other media—were guided by an aesthetic based on the delights of ornament and pattern. People took delight in objects that, to borrow terms from architectural history, were ‘uniform,’ ‘fair,’ and ‘curious,’ visual principles that may also be applied to other modes of perception, especially aural and spatial.

Such principles are also pertinent to Elizabethan writing. This module is an effort to study a culture in a genuinely interdisciplinary fashion, considering the multiple literary forms in late sixteenth-century England in the context of other arts and crafts. Addressing sonnet cycles and individual poems by Philip Sidney, Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and William Shakespeare, Spenser’s allegorical epic The Faerie Queene, plays by John Lyly and Christopher Marlowe, Sidney’s prose romance Arcadia, and Shakespeare’s early cycle of histories, students will be encouraged to consider these writers’ treatment of the medium of language in light of other disciplines: buildings such as Longleat and Burghley House, the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard, the recently emerging topic of Elizabethan painting, sartorial styles of the period, rhetorical manuals, sermons, and similarly relevant cultural products.

This module arises from recent scholarly efforts to expand the kinds of context available for study and to reinstate attention to the formal properties of texts, literary and otherwise. The importance of such patterning in relation to political organization will also be considered.

The ends of empires, emergent nationalisms, wars, and their combined transformative impact on material and human spaces complicate perspectives on the multi-layered twentieth- and twenty-first-century city. This interdisciplinary module brings together literature, film, and urban studies to approach the poetics and politics of the representation of the post-imperial city.

The selected texts and films focus on (Bombay)Mumbai, Cairo, London and Istanbul to explore a complex cultural geography of the post-imperial world alongside and beyond the dichotomies of the metropolitan centre and the periphery and the historical paradigms of postcolonial theory.

The aim is to critically engage with these texts and films as imaginative reconfigurations that supplement and contest the construction of these cities in histories and theories relating to postcolonialism, nationalism, globalisation, world-systems, migration, multiculturalism, and urbanism.

In a world increasingly dominated by globalisation and migration, the relationship between language and borders has become more complicated and, in many ways, more consequential than ever.

It is a key feature of contemporary literature to respond to these processes, as writers embed questions of language in the very practice of their writing. Their linguistic and formal innovations register new multilingual realities, bring different cultural and linguistic forms into dialogue, challenge alignments of language and nation, and address the possibilities and limits of translation in a globalised world.

This module will allow students to explore the implications of these forces and processes for our understanding of literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

Literary texts from a range of geographic, cultural and political contexts will be read alongside critical and theoretical debates at the intersection of several disciplinary perspectives: postcolonial studies, transnational studies, comparative literature, world literature and translation studies.

The module will initially be co-taught by Charlotte Scott (Goldsmiths) and by Bill Alexander, Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company. It will offer a unique opportunity to work directly with a respected theatre director as well as Renaissance specialists in the Department.

It will focus on a key Shakespeare play and comparable works of his near contemporaries closely analyse and explore how the plays are read in the rehearsal room. Looking at scene by scene, students will analyse how the playwright's language creates character; how images and imagery can shape performance choices; how songs and silences determine the physical relationships on stage and how the stage space is shaped and inhabited by the language in action.

The initial key text will be Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which will be compared with Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Therefore, alongside the performative elements of this module we will also focus on the representation of Jews in early modern England, developing critical awareness of how history is both created and denied in the theatre. The module will follow a structure of alternating weeks which focus on performance and text, respectively, to emphasise the historically revealing ways in which both Shakespeare's and Marlowe's play-worlds can be interpreted and performed.

The module requires students to read, listen and speak the play text in order to delve deep into the fascinating fabric of Shakespeare's world. Focusing on one of Shakespeare's most provocative and richly layered plays will give students of this module a rare insight into how ethical, aesthetic and intellectual decisions can be made in the rehearsal room.

The module will be structured according to the development of key skills, which will be developed through an alternate focus on close reading and contextual and critical history. The module with intersperse intensive and detailed exploration of Shakespeare's play in the rehearsal room with historically nuanced and critical readings of the place and representation of the Jew in early modern history and culture. We will read Marlowe's text alongside Shakespeare's text to heighten and develop our critical awareness of the performance of comedy, tragedy and the power of the 'alien' on stage.

The overall aim of this module is to explore the development of the English language, its variation and change, in relation to linguistic and social issues of language contact and multilingualism. Students will have the opportunity to study the spread of English and the rise to its current status as a global language, discuss the establishment of (English) language standards and (standard) varieties world-wide, the emergence of English as a Lingua Franca and other language contact phenomena. The focus will be on the challenges and opportunities open to multilingual societies and to consider the impact of English in multilingual settings. An understanding of Global Englishes and aspects of multilingualism gives students the necessary conceptual and theoretical tools to understand English practices in a multilingual world and to conduct their own research within an area they find of interest.

The module introduces students to a range of empirical studies and debates in a cross-disciplinary field that has become known as intercultural or cross-cultural communication. One of the questions researchers ask in this field is if speaking styles vary from culture to culture. For example, do some groups of speakers accept and encourage more overlap and simultaneous talk than others, or do understandings of directness and politeness vary culturally. Students will study inter/cross-cultural communication in everyday interaction but also in institutional settings, examining talk in business and educational settings such as the multilingual/multi-ethnic classroom. The module also explores the relevance of cultural stereotypes and cultural representations, for example, in media and tourism contexts.

Throughout the module students will need to consider the term ‘culture’ critically, comparing popular definitions of ‘culture’ as homogenous and static with postmodern models that highlight the heterogeneity and fluidity of ‘culture’. Students will become familiar with a range of methodological approaches to the study of language, culture and interaction. These tend to include the ethnography of speaking, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics and politeness theory. The module will not only ask students to study language/discourse and culture in a range of different English-speaking countries and settings, but it will also invite students to consider a variety of ‘other’ linguistic and cultural contexts.

This module aims to introduce students to contemporary approaches and frameworks of analysis of written texts. The module explores the analytic techniques and principles of written discourse analysis and gives students space to apply these techniques to a wide selection of texts (texts from the contemporary media, advertisements, textbooks, political and administrative texts, texts in translation, etc.). The module leads students to a discussion of how linguistic analysis can illuminate wider social issues, for example issues of power and ideology, issues of representation and identity. Students acquire knowledge of different levels of linguistic analysis, and learn to examine written texts at the micro-level, and to link the micro to the macro. The use of a variety of texts is intended to lead students to debates about language use and social issues in different areas of human activity: media representation, translation, education, etc.

What is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)? What are ELF implications for language teaching? How can teachers address the plurality of English in their teaching?

English as a lingua franca, and research into the plurality of English, is a vibrant field of investigation and this module aims to bridge the gap between the socio-cultural research on ELF and language teaching/teacher education.

You will start with exploring the dynamic, co-constructed and intercultural nature of ELF, focusing on pragmatic and multilingual aspects, before concentrating on pedagogic implications. Throughout the module, the emphasis is on the plurality of English, the fluidity and intercultural nature of ELF communication. These raise questions for pedagogical applications for the language classroom, which are addressed in relation to various aspects, such as multilingual resources, materials, assessment, a reconceptualization of the notion of communicative competence and ultimately a change of mindset for an ELF-informed pedagogy. The module intends to relate research on ELF (and theoretical questions ELF raises) to the practical concerns of teachers and teacher educators, and relate existing ELF findings to pedagogical practices within a critical pedagogy perspective.

This module is open to students interested in ELF and its applications for the classroom and to language teachers who would like to address ELF and the plurality of English in their pedagogy.