ENGL5348M AMERICAN CRISIS
Module tutor: Dr Hamilton Carroll
An introduction to current themes, methods, practices (including American Studies), and debates in American literary and cultural studies, the module will prepare students for advanced study in the field. The module does not proceed chronologically but is built around the organizing concept of crisis, which the module takes to be a foundational theme in American culture. Through the analysis of a group of core primary texts drawn from the past two centuries of American culture, students will examine how crisis functions, not only as a source of strife or hardship, but also as a site of possibility or transformation. Students will explore some of the central issues in American life: citizenship, democracy, nation, exceptionalism, capital, empire, possessive individualism. With a twinned focus on methods and practices, on the one hand, and themes and perspectives, on the other, the module will equip students both with advanced reading and interpretation skills and with the historical and contextual knowledge necessary for the study of American literature and culture at MA level.
Set Texts for Purchase :
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories
Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Edith Wharton, Summer
Stewart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster
ENGL5738M MODERNISM AND MASS CULTURE
Module tutor: Dr Katy Mullin
This module takes as its starting point Andreas Huyssen’s contention that mass culture is modernism’s “other”. Along with several other critics, Huyssen diagnoses at the heart of modernism a fundamental disdain for the popular and the mass, and a concomitant retreat into an increasingly esoteric intellectual elitism. We will examine the canonical texts of high modernism both in the context of the wide range of popular cultural forms which proliferated during the period, and alongside the realist texts which continued to be written. Do the canonical texts of high modernism necessarily express the disdain for mass culture Huyssen perceives? How do such texts compare in this respect to the apparently more “democratic” forms of realist writing? And, is disdain ever qualified by a modernist fascination with the exhilarating novelty of new forms of mass culture?
Texts for Purchase:
1) Framing the question of mass culture: John Carey, The Intellectuals and The Masses (1992).
2) The Rise of Mass Culture: George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891).
3) Who owns culture? Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895).
4) Modernism and New Technologies: Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).
5) Edith Wharton, The House Of Mirth (1905).
5) Edith Wharton, The House Of Mirth (1905).
6) Educating the masses: E M Forster, Howards End (1910).
7) Modernism and Consumer Culture: James Joyce, ‘Calypso’ and ‘Nausicaa’, chapters 4 and 13 of Ulysses (1922).
8) Modernism and Cinema: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1922).
9) Modernism and The Mob: T S Eliot, The Wasteland (1922).
10) After Modernism: Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (1960).
Semester 2
ENGL5338M IMPERIAL DESIGNS
Module tutor: Dr Sam Durrant
In his study of classical epic, Epic and Empire, David Quint argues that the epic tradition naturalises an imperial world view, that the business of epic is the production of master narratives, or more precisely, narratives of imperial mastery. In order to tell the story of modern empire, novelists have had recourse to many of the narrative strategies of epic, while seeking to disassociate themselves from the ideology of epic as a form. The distanced perspective of classical epic enables what Quint describes as the “heroic vision of concentrated power.” Modern epics bring this vision to crisis through the introduction of narrators whose self-reflexive world-view is at odds with the imperial designs of their heroes. This module begins by considering two seminal modernist narratives of empire, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. We then move on to explore the tension between conquest and its narration in a variety of twentieth-century narratives. During the course of our reading we will attempt to trace the continuities and discontinuities between epic, empire and masculinity; literature and violence; modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism; race, empire and capitalism; and British and American imperialism.
Texts for Purchase:
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Semester 2
ENGL5338M IMPERIAL DESIGNS
Module tutor: Dr Sam Durrant
In his study of classical epic, Epic and Empire, David Quint argues that the epic tradition naturalises an imperial world view, that the business of epic is the production of master narratives, or more precisely, narratives of imperial mastery. In order to tell the story of modern empire, novelists have had recourse to many of the narrative strategies of epic, while seeking to disassociate themselves from the ideology of epic as a form. The distanced perspective of classical epic enables what Quint describes as the “heroic vision of concentrated power.” Modern epics bring this vision to crisis through the introduction of narrators whose self-reflexive world-view is at odds with the imperial designs of their heroes. This module begins by considering two seminal modernist narratives of empire, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. We then move on to explore the tension between conquest and its narration in a variety of twentieth-century narratives. During the course of our reading we will attempt to trace the continuities and discontinuities between epic, empire and masculinity; literature and violence; modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism; race, empire and capitalism; and British and American imperialism.
Texts for Purchase:
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (Vintage 1936)
Wilson Harris, The Guyana Quartet (Faber 1960)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage
Derek Walcott, Omeros
ENGL5347M SOMETHING ROTTEN: TRANSLANTIC CAPITALISM AND THE LITERATURE OF WASTE, 1945-PRESENT
Module tutor: Dr Andrew Warnes
In his tour de force Wasted Lives (2003), Zygmunt Bauman claims that the production of human waste—refugees, lumpen proletarians, outcasts and misfits—is an inevitable consequence of modern capitalism. Modern capitalist culture, Bauman argues, remains obsessed with novelty and obsessively consigns what was new yesterday to its burgeoning rubbish dumps; it is hardly surprising, therefore, that it should begin to treat certain kinds of people the same way, deeming them, too, disposable, “used,” or otherwise redundant. In this MA module we consider this recent sociological idea at length, and ask how it is reflected or resisted in certain key literary and cultural works produced in the UK and US since World War Two. Albeit in very different ways, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye certainly reveal a common fascination with moments when humans are treated as flotsam or rubbish, and both of them might be said to understand their own narrative practices as a kind of redemptive activity in which interior monologue and other devices recover the humanity that the plot is imperilling at every turn. But this anxious interest in human waste comes to the surface in all of the primary novels on the module, surfacing in Doris Lessing’s depictions of an inhuman bureaucracy in Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) as well as in Raymond Carver’s accounts of commodification and bankruptcy in Collected Stories (1985). In the course of the module we will also step outside literature to consider other phenomena, and particularly UK punk and postpunk’s celebration of all things rotten, in which individual artists have almost seemed to affirm the low designation Bauman critiques.
Texts for Purchase:
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (2004)
In his tour de force Wasted Lives (2003), Zygmunt Bauman claims that the production of human waste—refugees, lumpen proletarians, outcasts and misfits—is an inevitable consequence of modern capitalism. Modern capitalist culture, Bauman argues, remains obsessed with novelty and obsessively consigns what was new yesterday to its burgeoning rubbish dumps; it is hardly surprising, therefore, that it should begin to treat certain kinds of people the same way, deeming them, too, disposable, “used,” or otherwise redundant. In this MA module we consider this recent sociological idea at length, and ask how it is reflected or resisted in certain key literary and cultural works produced in the UK and US since World War Two. Albeit in very different ways, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye certainly reveal a common fascination with moments when humans are treated as flotsam or rubbish, and both of them might be said to understand their own narrative practices as a kind of redemptive activity in which interior monologue and other devices recover the humanity that the plot is imperilling at every turn. But this anxious interest in human waste comes to the surface in all of the primary novels on the module, surfacing in Doris Lessing’s depictions of an inhuman bureaucracy in Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) as well as in Raymond Carver’s accounts of commodification and bankruptcy in Collected Stories (1985). In the course of the module we will also step outside literature to consider other phenomena, and particularly UK punk and postpunk’s celebration of all things rotten, in which individual artists have almost seemed to affirm the low designation Bauman critiques.
Texts for Purchase:
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (2004)
William Golding, Pincher Martin (1956)
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (1979)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)
Raymond Carver, Collected Stories (1985)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
In addition, a series of You Tube links will be circulated in advance of a seminar focusing on images of waste in UK punk and postpunk.
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