MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture
Convenor: Jane Elliott
Suggested introductory reading for new students
The Modern School offers a broad range of options in the literature and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries within the structure of its MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture. These options enable individual graduate students to construct a distinct, individually chosen MA programme, yet build on the critical, theoretical, and historical contexts that are established in the core course. Students can design a course that will suit their wish either to acquire a general knowledge of the period or to specialise in a particular area.
Full-time students take the core course and one option course during the Autumn Term, and two option courses during the Spring term. Part-time students take the core course during their first term, then one option course in each following Autumn and Spring Term. The required course work consists of three assessed essays of approximately 4,500 words each. The Summer Term and the rest of the academic year are devoted to the production of a 15-20,000 word dissertation, written in consultation with a supervisor on a topic to be agreed with the course convenor, to be submitted in September. Full-time students complete the course in one year, part-time students in two years.
Core
Course: Reading Modernity
This course is an introduction to some of the key critical and theoretical
debates in the study of modern literature and culture. It offers students
the opportunity to examine a number of issues that are central to the period,
such as: the relation of modern aesthetic practices to historical and social
change; the inter-relation of literature with other art forms; the relationships
between literature and theory; and the development of film as mass art and
as radical aesthetic practice. All students on the MA will take the course
together so as to foster early on the sense of intellectual community. It
is expected that the material encountered in the core course will resonate
with and fortify the work students will do in their options.
Option courses on offer will vary from year to year, according to staff availability, and will run subject to minimum numbers. Below is a list of some of those offered in recent years. Where available, further details of the courses listed below can be found by clicking on the name of the course. Some are in pdf format and should open automatically when you single click on them, but if you need to install Acrobat Reader, follow the instructions at www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. Students may also apply to take a module from another MA programme; interdisciplinary work is strongly encouraged.
American
Cinematic Myths of Landscape and City: The Western and Film
Noir
Judith Buchanan
This course analyses two genres from the mainstream of Hollywood production
- the Western, in its endlessly mutating instantiations, and films noirs.
It involves the study of the novels, scripts, directors, stars, studios,
cinematic techniques, gender representations and socio-political contexts
that have constituted both the Western and film noir. From these analyses,
the larger question about how Hollywood genres in general have been constituted
will be addressed. This is a question that is important not only to film
critics and historians but also, crucially, to the industry itself in helping
to define and locate its market.
American
Fiction since 1960
Lawrence Rainey
Opening with two Jewish-American writers (Saul Bellow, Philip Roth) who
commanded critical attention in the 1960s, the course goes on to survey
the "postmodern" writing of the 1970s and 1980s (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo,
Paul Auster), then the rise of new gay, ethnic, and racial voices from
the same period to the present (e.g., Edmund White, Oscar Hijuelos, Toni
Morrison, Sherman Alexie, Jhumpa Lahiri). The final weeks are devoted to
younger, more contemporary writers.
Beckett's Drama and Beyond
Emilile Morin
In this seminar, we will reflect upon Samuel Beckett’s
drama and its legacy. The works discussed range from plays
commonly recognised as Beckett’s
masterpieces, such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame, to
short, experimental texts written for radio and television. We will consider
Beckett’s influence on the development of non-naturalistic forms in
British and Irish drama after 1950; playwrights examined will include Harold
Pinter, Sarah Kane, Brendan Behan, Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness,
Brian Friel and Conor McPherson.
Cultures of Life-writing:
the Victorians
Trev Broughton
Why was Life-writing so popular among Victorian writers and readers? What
roles did it play in the formation of 'literary' and 'popular' cultures?
How was it related to politics, class-consciousness, feminism, national identities?
This module will explore the emergence of a number of recognizably 'Victorian'
trends in auto/biography: the conversion narrative, the collective Life,
the Life of Letters, the working-class autobiography, as well as the relationship
between memoirs, scandal and celebrity.
Deconstruction,
Ethics and Literature
Derek Attridge
There would be wide agreement that one of the major developments in literary
theory and criticism over the last thirty years has been deconstruction,
but the term covers a wide range of positions and practices. This course
examines some of these, focusing especially on the ethical questions raised
in more recent years and on the importance of these questions for literary
study. The central figures studied are Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas;
others whose work is discussed include Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-François
Lyotard.
Flaubert
and After
Geoff Wall
This is an opportunity to explore the work of one of the major writers
of the later nineteenth century, a writer who transformed the practices
of realism and by his example shaped much of modern fiction. The course
will focus equally on Flaubert and on a selection of those later writers
who adopted some version of his artistic principles.
Henry
James
Victoria Coulson
This is an opportunity to study in depth the writing of one of the most
important writers of the nineteenth century, whose earliest work owes a
great deal to
Austen’s narrative ironies but whose later writing engages with questions
of subjectivism and the paradoxes of authority which would preoccupy Stein,
Woolf, and Joyce. Through close reading, and interdisciplinary engagement
with texts from psychoanalysis, theology, and art history, the module encourages
students to develop new and experimental languages for the advanced analysis
of James’s writing.
The Idea of Partition: Literary
Representations from India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, and
Ireland
Anna Bernard
This course brings together twentieth-century narratives by writers from
India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, and Ireland/Northern Ireland in order to
investigate the literary representation of partition from a comparative standpoint.
Paying particular attention to questions of form and genre, we will identify
and interrogate the parallels and contrasts between these narratives, with
the aim of finally assessing whether partition literature might be considered
a transnational or global category of literary production. Authors studied
will include Amos Oz, Salman Rushdie, Mourid Barghouti, and Seamus Deane,
among others.
Innovative Fictions
since 1950
Richard Walsh
The second half of the 20th century saw an international flowering of innovative
fictional forms as authors from Samuel Beckett to David Foster Wallace explored
the range of new possibilities, in the wake of modernism, for the novel and
short story. These fictions break new ground in terms of their experimentation
with narrative content and structure, with genre, with fictional self-consciousness,
with representational rhetoric, with formal constraints and with intertextuality.
We shall consider a number of such texts, both in their own right and in
relation to the established conventions of fiction, and ask ourselves how
(or if) they work, and what light they shed upon notions of fictional representation,
fictive rhetoric and literary competence.
Modern Arabic Literature
Ziad Elmarsafy
The aim of this course is to survey the salient moments and trends of the
Arabic literature of the twentieth century, with a specific focus on the
engagement of writers in Arabic with the idea and experience of "modernity" and
modernism, broadly conceived. We will try where possible to to complicate
received ideas about Western versus non-Western identities and traditional
versus modern writing.
Narrative,
Fiction, Theory
Richard Walsh
The field of narrative theory has flourished since the late 1960s, initially
under a structuralist and post-structuralist banner; more recent developments
include cognitive narratology, which explores our ability to make sense of
stories, and to use stories to make sense of experience, as a fundamental
mental faculty. This course is an opportunity to inquire into both the foundations
and the state of the art of narrative theory, and in particular what it has
to offer for our understanding of fiction.
The
Novel in Africa
David Attwell
What happens to the novel when it is unmoored from its socio-cultural origins
in eighteenth-century Europe and taken up by writers working under colonial
and postcolonial conditions? In particular, how do African conditions of
authorship require us to re-think the novel's aesthetic and ideological
possibilities? This course examines the varied publics of African fiction,
the cultural influences acting upon it (both European and indigenous),
and the form's history and varied achievements in Africa. In doing so,
it also asks how the theory and literary history of the novel has been
extended through contact with the African continent.
Office
Politics: the Secretary in Film and Fiction, 1890-1940
Lawrence Rainey
Nothing did more to transform the lives of twentieth century women than
the development of modern office culture. Changing notions of sexuality
and gender roles; technology, capital and new communication systems; the
status of the individual in a new world shaped by systematic management;
a media culture and the status of narrative - all the motifs of today are
to be found in nucleo in this forgotten continent of the modern
imagination.
Poetic Form and Cultural Formations
Hugh Haughton
This course looks at questions of poetic form and cultural definition
in twentieth-century poetry, focussing on salient poems by significant
British and Irish poets, in particular those who engage with
the legacy of modernism on the one hand while struggling to define
the complex specificity of their cultural situations on the other.
Seminar discussion will focus on particular poems and poets,
working via close reading of poetic texts. Alongside them we
will look statements on poetry, poetics and culture made by the
poets. The course will respond to the particular interests and
agendas of the students taking it.
Postcolonial
Studies
Anna Bernard et al
This course introduces and explores the theoretical debates concerning colonial
and post-colonial cultures. Rather than taking 'post-colonial' as an unproblematic
term, the course addresses the intellectual, aesthetic and material stakes
involved in its deployment, and situates the term in relation to earlier
anti-colonial and liberationist formulations.
South
African Literatures
David Attwell
The central focus of this option will be the South African novel written
English during the period 1970 to the present, but some attention will
be given to earlier literature and to other genres. The course will raise
questions about - among other things - the distinctiveness of South African
writing, the role of literature in the resistance to apartheid, the conditions
experienced by women and their representation in literature, and the challenges
presented to writers by the post-apartheid period.
Strangers
to Ourselves: Dickens and Collins
John Bowen
This course will focus on the later fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie
Collins, and will read a selection of their single- and co-authored works,
including Collins's The Moonstone (1868), Dickens's Tale of Two
Cities (1859) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and collaborative
writings such as 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners' and 'The Lazy
Tour of Two Idle Apprentices' These writings change in important ways the
shape and course of the modern novel, and help create important new generic
possibilities in 'sensation' and detective fiction. We will be particularly
concerned with the texts' depictions of imperial violence abroad and social
transgression at home, their concern with weird, uncanny and doubled identities,
and their formal and narrative modernity. We will also consider the conceptual
challenges that literary collaboration and joint-authorship raise for criticism.
Also, new for 2009/10
American Poetry from 1945 to the Present
Nasser Hussain
This module will be a sustained engagement with the poetry produced
in the US between the end of the second World War and up to the
present. Given the rapidly changing political, social, economic,
intellectual and pragmatic contexts in the US over these six
decades, it would be fraudulent to impose an all-encompassing
narrative that 'maps' out
the 'progress' or evolution of American poetry as we
will encounter it. Over the term, we will examine the modernist
roots of the post-WWII poetry in the initial stage of the course,
and move through the major 'schools' or movements in
America (from confessional lyric to Black Mountain to Language
poetry to those poets currently writing in new formats/media).
However, we will do so with Charles Bernstein’s words in mind:
'Schools of poetry are for people too lazy to read all of the
poems'.
Literature and Human Rights
Michelle Kelly
This module will explore some of the literature that has engaged with human
rights issues, from documenting human rights violations or articulating a
human rights claim to offering a critique of the limitations of human rights
discourse. Topics may include:
the fictions of development and dignity that inform the discourse of human
rights; the centrality of testimony and narrative to human rights practice
and the ethical implications of this; the circulation and reception of fiction
and autobiography relating to human rights and the values that underpin it;
the encounter between literature and the law or quasi-legal institutions
such as truth commissions; challenges to our definition of the human or the
post-human that arise in the texts; and the limits and limitations of human
rights discourse as they emerge in the various texts.
The Novel Now: Conceptualizing 21st-Century Fiction
in Britain and the US
Jane Elliott
While the postmodernist rubric seems to have been waning since
the start of the 21st-century, it is yet not clear what paradigm
or paradigms will take its place. Currently conversations across contemporary
fiction studies are focused around several subtopics, including 9/11,
the post-national or world novel, dystopias and literary sci-fi, and
the effect of TV and other media on the form and status of the novel.
In this course, we will assess these new critical directions by reading
a variety of post-1999 fiction published in and/or widely read in the
US and UK, placing these texts in conversation with recent or currently
prominent theoretical work.
The Department has close interdisciplinary relations with the Philosophy and History of Art Departments and the Centre for Women's Studies, and many students also take modules from their programmes.
Tutors involved in the MA in Modern Literature and Culture during 2009/10 will include: David Attwell, Anna Bernard, John Bowen, Judith Buchanan, Victoria Coulson, Jane Elliott, Ziad Elmarsafy, Hugh Haughton, Nasser Hussain, Michelle Kelly, Emilie Morin, Erica Sheen, Geoff Wall and Richard Walsh. Students may also seek to work with other members of staff for their dissertations.
Below is a provisional list of options which will run in 2009/10 Autumn Term 2009
Spring Term 2010
Please note the following:
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