ImagiNation: The Great American Novel

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

'The Great American Novel' became something of a shibboleth in the 20th century, for American writers and critics alike. Was it possible to capture the essence, as well as the diversity, of the American nation in fiction? And if so, how should this be done – in a novel of panoramic reach, such as John Dos Passos' USA to Don De Lillo's Underworld, or in representation of America's historico-political unconscious, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved or Jayne Anne Phillips' Machine Dreams, or could a topic so ostensibly small as family life come to take on the burden of representative American-ness, as in Jonathan Frantzen's The Corrections?

In this course you will look at representations of American history in fiction-both film and literature-to discover how American fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries has represented American history, politics, and most of all national identity. Because of this subject matter, you will be taking on big novels, which may also be great –though the definition of 'greatness' will itself be part of your investigation, rather than a foregone conclusion. You will, for example, consider questions of representativeness as well as representation, and this will involve issues of gender, race and ethnicity, mainstream and margin, the local and the cosmopolitan. You will be drawing on cultural theory and historiography to put your reading and viewing into scholarly perspective.

Modernism 1910-1945

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

You will explore the achievements and limits of English modernism through a detailed examination of the work of two of its principal writers, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Eliot's contributions as a poet, essayist and dramatist were key to the revolution in the theory and practice of modern poetry, while Woolf's contributions as a novelist and essayist were key to the revolution and practice of the modern novel. You will explore the similarities and differences in their treatment of mind and consciousness; their views of and treatment of history; their representation of the city; their attitudes to questions of sexuality and gender; their notions of nation and of national identity; their responses to new mass cultural technologies from the popular press to photography, radio and the cinema; and their responses to the key events of the period in which they lived, including the First and the Second World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism.

The module will be organised chronologically and thematically and will enable you to follow personal as well as intellectual associations between Eliot and Woolf and between Eliot, Woolf and their modernist contemporaries. You will, in particular, reflect on the ways in which Woolf responded as a writer to Eliot's work and Eliot as a writer responded to Woolf's work.

Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module will explore the terms modernism and postmodernism, and the relationship between the two, by reading a range of novels which engage with issues of artistic form, subjectivity, and modernity. We'll ask a variety of questions including: How has the 20th and 21st century novel represented the attempt to delineate the shape of individual lives through 'portraits'? What changes to the novel's terrain have been effected by contemporary history, war, or historical trauma? How useful is the term postmodernism for describing contemporary writing? How have high and mass cultural forms, such as visual art, the cinema, the web, etc. influenced contemporary writing? How do recent novels portray the aesthetic? What different ideas of temporality do we find in modernist and postmodernist writing? What versions of borrowing from the past do we find in modernism and postmodernism and what purposes do these borrowings serve? Is there what the critic Andreas Huyssen has called a 'great divide' between modernism and postmodernism? What continuities might we find between modernism and postmodernism (if those terms are still useful)? Authors read will include Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Coe and Marilynne Robinson.

Sexuality and Creative Writing

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

This module will explore the relationship between literary production, authorship, and gender and sexual identities. The module will introduce neo-Classical and Romantic theories of creativity before asking how twentieth and twenty-first century authors have grappled with these inherited narratives. For example, how do writers who dis-identify with received categories deal with literary traditions that are often construed as a meeting (or battle) between the 'masculine' and the 'feminine'? Where do feminism and same-sex desire fit into this story? And how have recent innovations in reproductive technology affected the familiar analogy between parenthood and literary production? Possible topics for study include: lesbian, gay and bisexual revisionings of literary tradition; historically varying representations of Sappho; the author as (male) Romantic genius; 'Nature' as literary mother; transgender identity and literary androgyny; erotic representations of the writer-muse relationship; authorship as maternity and/or paternity; writing as erotic collaboration; writing and celibacy; new narratives of reproduction and the family; writing and masturbation. Students will have the opportunity of presenting a combination of creative and critical writing should they wish to.

Style: The Necessary Failure

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

Style is what draws us to works of art, but it is also something that we find very difficult to define or describe. It is understood variously as belonging to groups or to individuals; as being difficult or easy; as something superficial to the work of art, or else as the substance of its depths; as either apolitical, or as the sign and guarantor of political commitment. This module will pursue the problem of artistic style across a number of periods and artistic media, including literature, visual art, and cinema. Readings will include works of aesthetic theory and philosophy, film theory, literary theory and criticism, and art history. We will think about style as a historically shifting category of artistic experience by engaging a number of case studies in which style becomes an object of contention, controversy, or disagreement.

The Migrant Writer: Postcolonialism and Creativity

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

`To write is to travel', according to Iain Chambers, and the module will use this idea to explore the displacement of the writing subject within the historical context postcolonial migration. We will analyse the work of key immigrant writers in relation to central concepts in literary and cultural criticism, including: hybridity and dialogical discourse, the development of `border languages', mimicry and the migrant subject, homelessness and the creation of new cartographies, and diasporic and non- originary histories. In the process the centrality of migration, exile and displacement to a range of critical and theoretical approaches will be highlighted.

Theory in Practice: Readings in Contemporary Theory and Literature

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

What is 'theory'? Although it goes in and out of fashion with the speed of rising or plunging hemlines, the use of theory, literary theory, or literary criticism as a way to read literary texts is always useful. And contrary to popular opinion, it's not the application of an arcane or secret language to garner a secret knowledge. Rather, it is a self-conscious and informed method of analysing the presuppositions behind the apparently natural way we read; indeed, sometimes it's a method of reading in itself, derived from a philosophy or theory of language, as is the case with Bataille or Derrida. Theory sounds dull, but really it's a creative practice, as is reading, which Walter Benjamin likened to telepathy.

This module seeks, through a number of case studies, to address a number of critical paradigms that have proved significant in the post-war period. In particular, notions of materialism, materiality and historicity will be set in tension with ideas about relativism, deconstruction and 'play' as very different ways of construing some iconic American texts. Alongside the close reading of primary and secondary texts, discussions in class will be directed towards such subjects as: the construction/reflection of subjectivity in language and discourse; the relation of the literary text to sociality; the effects and efficacy of modernist/avant-garde/postmodern literary techniques; and the writing of race, gender and class.