MA Literary Studies: Pathway in Modern and Contemporary Literature

This module surveys the most internationally significant trends, influences, and movements in European and American literature of the 20^th century.

Topics covered include:

• an examination the impact of the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Nietzsche on early 20^th century literature
• the modernist disruption of literary conventions of Realism
• the Harlem Renaissance
• modernist poetry
• existentialist philosophy and writing
• the ethics of writing on the post-Holocaust
• the emergence of poststructuralism
• OULIPO
• the experimental texts of postmodernism

We’ll finish by considering what, if any, literary movements come after postmodernism in the 21^st century by examining the term ‘contemporary.’ These developments are studied through the analysis of major representative texts studied within their relevant cultural, intellectual and philosophical contexts. Writers studied typically include James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, H. D., André Gide, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, William Faulkner, Primo Levi, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

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.

The module surveys key currents in literary and cultural theory from the turn of the 20^th century to the present day. Beginning with the examination of shifting ideas and theories of the literary during the discipline’s development, it goes on to explore key thinkers and tendencies, starting with Nietzsche. These will include Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin and Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, structuralism, 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 students to focus on theoretical concepts in their own right. You’ll also be asked to consider the theoretical implications of the particular formal and stylistic choices made by the thinkers covered.

The module intensively surveys Caribbean and diaspora literature to highlight significant movements relative to the social, political and historical contexts impacting upon this new literature. We are interested in tracing 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 literature. 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)

This module examines the current debate in 19th century studies about connections between Romantic and Victorian literature, and the persistence of a Romantic tradition throughout the century. You’ll be able to develop your own interests in two key literary periods and to question the usefulness of traditional periodisation. We’ll 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.

Topics we’ll cover include:

• 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
• publication in a changing literary marketplace
• popular genres such as Gothic and sensation fiction

Reading Romantic and Victorian writers 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; literary representations of individual psychology and an increasing fascination with extreme mental states. Through poetry and fiction, we’ll address the intersection of literature, culture, and the physical environment, and the impact of industrial development on the countryside and urban environments. We’ll explore representations of gender and sexualities in Gothic and sensation fiction, and in the dramatic monologue. We’ll relate English literature to its global context, exploring conceptions of nationalism and democracy in relation to the construction of Europe in the age of revolutions, cosmopolitanism, and the relationship between Hellenism, Orientalism and imperialism in literary representations of race and religion. 

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.

Much significant and powerful contemporary fiction is written by those who come, or whose families have come, from outside the metropolitan and erstwhile imperial centres. This fiction is often called ‘postcolonial’ and the body of theory about the relation of the West and the rest of the world has come to be known as ‘postcolonial theory’.

In this module, we’ll focus on key samples of postcolonial fiction and theory from a range of authors, seeking to understand the complex, dialogic relations between metropolitan and non-metropolitan writing (both anglophone and francophone). Each two-hour class will be based on student presentations, combining discussion of a literary text illustrative of key issues in postcolonial culture and criticism, and of one or two sample critical pieces in the field.

Proceeding chronologically from the beginning of the 20^th century to the present, this module provides an overview of the diverse forms of women’s writing across a variety of genres and from diverse cultural, critical and historical perspectives. Beginning in 1929 with Woolf’s germinal account of the conditions necessary to become a woman writer in A Room of One’s Own, the module includes short stories, critical essays, poetry and multimedia experimental texts as well as novels and life-writing.

Reading key texts from almost a century of feminist literary theory, we’ll build up a detailed overview of feminist literary history and the ways in which this has had an uneven development across national and cultural contexts. The module provides an overview of the various waves of feminism and the diverse ways in which race, class and gender intersect in literature and criticism as well a careful consideration of formal as well as thematic questions.

This module encourages you to be attentive to the textual aesthetics of writing as well as to the ideological and intellectual content of literary text. We’ll cover debates around definitions of a 'woman' and women’s writing, the variety of feminisms, transgression, and the #metoo effect. The module offers an engagement with contemporary writing and a wider sense of the changing nature of writers, critics and readers in the 21^st  century.

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 several different perspectives.

Through this module, you’ll gain a sound grasp of the literature of and on both the broad relationship between literature and philosophy, and on the specific thinkers of the subject. We’ll address the place of literature in the modern European philosophy tradition, and you’ll be able to expound and analyse the textual and conceptual styles of the key thinkers on the course.

Examining contemporary indigenous writing from Canada, the United States, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Guatemala, this course will question literature’s ability to comment on matters such as indigenous sovereignty, cultural distinctiveness, colonial encounters, and geographical presences.

By exploring the work of eight authors and their engagement with identity, place and politics, the course offers an in-depth understanding of contemporary tribal literature and its contexts. Several literary genres will be discussed, including prose, poetry and autobiography, and we’ll consider how various modes of writing have been used to reflect and construct aboriginal and indigenous worldviews in the 20^th and 21^st century.

Seminars will also reflect on perceptions of tribal identity as well as cultural or personal trauma arising from genocide and removal. You’ll be asked to consider the attempt to mesh storytelling and traditional narrative with contemporary literary aesthetics.

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’ll start with exploring current research on the 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, and how to address these in pedagogy, in relation to multilingual resources, materials, assessment, a reconceptualisation of the notion of communicative competence and ultimately a change of mindset for an ELF-informed pedagogy.

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.

This is a new blended-learning module which will run in collaboration with the University of Bahia (Salvador, Brazil) in synchronous communication.

In an era where human activities such as fossil fuel use is the key factor in shaping our environmental future, a growing body of literary work has emerged that seeks to explore the inextricability of social and natural catastrophe.

In this module, you’ll consider the engagement of contemporary American fiction with a range of environmental crises, from climate change to pollution to ecological collapse. You’ll also explore how American fiction has evolved and adapted to capture this subject matter. 

We’ll question how this fiction might play a role in generating effective and politically transformative public knowledge in the face of dissociation from the consequences of fossil fuel.

We will be asking this question and more through the exploration and scrutiny of a range of novelistic genres: e.g., realism, magical realism, postmodernism, the graphic novel, and weird, science, dystopian and speculative fiction.

In this module, you’ll explore themes of 21st-century American fiction, asking in what ways this literary period may be considered distinct and different, in what ways it continues fiction’s preoccupations of the last century, and so how the contemporary might be periodised. You’ll examine a number of urgent contextual themes to which American fiction has responded. For example, the module considers fiction’s response to the recent politics of race that has seen the continuing institutionalisation of racism and disposability of African American lives. You’ll investigate the ways that fiction gives form to the experience of living under recent phases of capitalism, from the Great Recession to neoliberal ideas of life as a private enterprise and subjectivity as essentially entrepreneurial.

You’ll examine whether the experience of history and memory, is still understood in terms of trauma, and whether trauma is applied to a wider range of experiences. From the historical violence of, for example, war, terrorism, genocide, and slavery, to more insidious forms of oppression related to socio-economic, racial, gender, and sexual status and identity.

Through a selection of titles, you’ll consider whether the concept of national literary identity is still valid. You’ll explore the entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds and the ecological catastrophes that ensue – e.g., climate change. Each week’s reading will be accompanied by pertinent extracts providing critical, theoretical, cultural, social, or historical context.

‘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 literary and visual decadence in Europe in the 19^th century, with a focus on the cross-cultural currents between England and France.

It considers the emergence of decadence in France as a challenge to the orthodoxies of Romanticism and as an anticipation of Modernism by English decadents and European Symbolists at the Fin de Siècle. Beginning with cultural-historical contexts and definitions of terms, we’ll study the closely related movements of Aestheticism, decadence, and Symbolism, and the decadent preoccupation with neuroses, obsessions, dreams, artifice, intense sensations, sensuality, perverse sexuality, parody, and crime.

French and other-language texts will be studied in specified translations; knowledge of French, though useful, is not a prerequisite for this module.

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.

In this module, we’ll focus on contemporary African American writing (fiction, poetry and prose essays) with a major emphasis on the 21^st century and with some examples from the 20^th century. Our aim is to assess and evaluate the diverse range of literary expression in the tumultuous historical contexts which constitute the post-Civil Rights era, Obama’s presidency and beyond.

The texts we’ll examine, however, are set in the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries and attend to multiple aspects of American literature and culture, thereby affording a complex and robust understanding of the relationship of contemporary and historical American literary culture and debates. We’ll investigate whether and how African American literature coheres after the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. We’ll pay particular attention to form, including satire, memoir, the novel, and prose poetry.

African American literary expression often destabilises racial orthodoxies and invites complex understandings of identity formation. Therefore, we’ll examine the debates about African American identity which continue to be central to and contested by writers, and informed by the wider contexts of American fiction, feminism, class, gender, sexuality and protest.

This module offers a historical and socio-cultural grounding in the representations of blackness in Britain across literary and performance contexts from earliest extant evidence to the present. As one of two core compulsory modules within the MA Black British Literature programme, it explores how Black British- born writers creatively engage with history in prose fiction, poetry, life writing and drama.

The tropes and cultural personae that existed prior to Britain's imperial enterprise (and ideology that rationalised enslavement and colonisation) pre-set the co-ordinates by which the interface between literary heritages and histories is traced. Although some black authors were published in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards, there is no extant evidence of this in drama until the twentieth century.

The module's broad chronological sweep will create a problematised continuum by which to understand and analyse the field of Black British writing and its influential (re)shaping of British culture as perceived at home and abroad. What are the lines of descent and tradition that connect writers across time and place? What part do retrospective, historical novels, poems, or dramas play in imaginatively retrieving and reviving marginalised voices from the past? The module will navigate diasporic and aesthetic routes of black British literary heritages.

Black British writing offers striking and transformative contributions to performativity on and off the page. This module explores the aesthetic heritages that shape contemporary Black British texts and the contextual factors contouring production, publication and performance. It explores innovations derived from reworking the canon through remixing, sampling and other compositional practices in relation to a varied demographic of auditors, interlocutors, readers, and listeners. We consider what new textual liquidities are created by poly-generic and trans-generic methods of writing and what the implications these might have for literary criticism.

The module examines critical languages and participates in the task of evolving an inter-referential methodology that can meet the demands of writing that slips between, and re-works literary genres and performance traditions. Typography, aurality, orality and the grammars of dramatic-poetic analysis comprise some of the emphases of potential critique.

Close attention will be paid to narrative form in representing subjects such as:

• mixed and multi-ethnic experiences as challenging the feasibility of a black/white binary of power and ideology
• the solo voice in dramatic monologue and monodrama, as a vehicle for women’s voices and as biopic
• poetic theatre and theatricalised poetry in performance
• Landmark Poetics (how poetry on public monuments retrieves and invites recalibrations of commemorative history)
• Rurality (the countryside as traditionally cultural exclusion zone for black representation and location of submerged presences)
• LGBTQI+ writing 
• the aesthetics of rendering adoption, fostering and care-experienced lives

In this process, aesthetic principles will be extrapolated from representational techniques - noting the pressures that Black British writers’ texts apply to conventions of literary genres in creating experientially distinctive and innovative works.

This module examines how science fiction has been, and continues to be, an arena for contending ideas regarding gender, race, and politics in the United States. Charting the development of post-war Science Fiction, we’ll examine how the genre responded to the Cold War and America’s legacy of militarisation and how it mutated into a multitude of complex political and cultural explorations up till today.

We’ll discuss topics such as:

• feminist politics
• ecological anxieties
• racial dystopias and utopias
• the intersections between human agency
• robotics and technology
• multispecies and interspecies relations
• predictions regarding governance past and future (e.g., libertarian, socialist, and fascist)
• pre and post-humanist philosophy

The module will allow you to incorporate various secondary sources to bring in semiotics, postmodernism, Black and feminist criticism, and eco-theory into your assessments of the material read. Screenings of iconic science fiction films may also be offered during the duration of the module. This module does not require pre-existing expertise in American Literature. It can be taken by all students on the MA Literary Studies pathways as well as students in linguistics, creative writing, translation and any interested media and communications students.