Download 2014/15 Units Running in the Department of English for Year 2

2014/15
Units Running in the Department of English for Year 2 students
The descriptions below are intended to act as a brief and user-friendly guide to the units we
are offering in 2014/15. Please note that we do not guarantee that all the listed units will
run. A unit may be withdrawn, for instance, if there is insufficient demand for it. If you have
any queries regarding the information below, we would strongly recommend that you seek
advice from your Personal Tutor. Where a Unit Director’s name is asterisked (*) further
information is available from Dr Samantha Matthews (Deputy Head of Subject).
Period units running in Teaching Block 1
ENGL20200/ENGL20202 Literature 1 (1200-1500)
Unit Director: Professor Ad Putter
TB1
No previous knowledge of Middle English is required for this unit. Students are taught to
read Middle English and are introduced to some of the major authors and works of the 14th
and 15th Centuries, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde; Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight and the elegy Pearl; Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman;
and Malory's Morte Darthur. Some lectures will also offer general information about
medieval life, thought and society. Passages from one of the Canterbury Tales and from Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight will be set for translation and commentary in a final exam.
Students will be prepared for the exam both in tutorials and in lectures.
Aims:
The aim of this unit is to give students a grounding in Middle English literature of the 14th
and 15th centuries. This literature will be studied in the original language. At the end of this
unit, students should have developed a basic command of Middle English language. We also
aim to give students and understanding of the distinctive qualities of medieval literature, as
well as an understanding of the ethos and aesthetics of some important writers of the
period.
Optional units running in Teaching Block 1
ENGL29003 Writing the Self: Literature and Autobiography
Unit Director: Professor Andrew Bennett
TB1
This unit will explore texts which take as their topic the life of the writer, focusing on the
relationship between writing and life as it is figured in fictions of autobiography. The unit is
concerned with ways in which authors represent their own lives in literary texts whether
autobiographical in a conventional sense, fictionalised autobiography, or more loosely
based around authors' lives. We will examine a number of key texts published over the last
two centuries, including poems and poem-collections, novels, short stories, memoirs, and
essays. A consideration of such texts will necessarily lead into questions concerning the
nature of biography and autobiography; the historical development of the autobiographical
mode; fiction and history; memory, forgetting and the unconscious; the nature of
confession and personal identity; the politics of self-representation; questions of gender and
sexuality; the limits of genre; truth telling and lies; 'literary' and other writing; and so on.
Aims:
The unit is intended to provide an introduction to literary autobiography, to fictionalised
autobiography and to questions surrounding such modes of writing; it is intended to
encourage students to develop their skills of critical analysis and thinking by engaging with a
series of literary texts particularly concerned with autobiography and the critical and
theoretical issues raised thereby.
ENGL29007 American Literature: 1945-present
Unit Director: Dr Stephen Cheeke
TB1
This unit will focus upon American writing from 1945 to the present, including novels, short
stories, poetry, essays and journalism. The weekly seminar will be based around a particular
author or text(s), sometimes a specific subject. The aim of the course is to introduce
students to a wide range of post-war American writing and to explore the connections
between this work and the extraordinary events and developments in American history and
culture from 1945 to the present. Authors to be studied may include: Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote,
Flannery O’Connor, John Barth, Cormac McCarthy, Mary McCarthy, Raymond Carver, John
Cheever, E.L. Doctorow, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Richard Yates, Robert Lowell,
Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, the New York Poets.
The unit aims to introduce students to a wide range of post-war American novelists and
poets, and to guide them through the exploration of the connections between this work and
American history and culture from 1945 to the present.
ENGL29008 Revenge Tragedy
Unit Director: Dr Lesel Dawson
TB1
Revenge has been a central preoccupation from Aeschylus to Tarantino. Acts of vengeance
raise perplexing questions about the ethical meaning of retribution, the responsibilities of
the living to the dead, and the relationship between mourning and memory. This course will
explore the representation of revenge across a wide selection of literary texts, some of
which will be read in translation. Among the topics investigated will be: tensions between
the vengeance of the individual and the operations of law, the moral and emotional
transformation of the revenger, the haunting presence of the dead, and ideas about
pollution and expiation. Starting with plays from the classical period which form an essential
background to revenge tragedy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we will study a
range of tragedies, relating individual texts to dramatic ideas of genre, to traditions and
conventions of stage representation, and to the historical contexts of the period.
Aims:
This unit aims to introduce a principal dramatic genre of English Renaissance drama. Starting
with plays from the classical period which form an essential background to revenge tragedy
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, students will study a range of tragedies, relating
individual texts to dramatic ideas of genre, to traditions and conventions of stage
representation and to the historical contexts of the period.
ENGL20018 Early Modern Prose Fiction
Unit Director: Dr Tamsin Badcoe
TB1
From social satire to early science fiction, this unit will focus on a range of prose texts from
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including works by the university wits Robert
Greene and Thomas Nashe, the playful philosopher and statesman Thomas More, and
pioneering women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wroth. We will pay close
attention to the historical and cultural contexts in which the texts were written and
published, and use this to think about how each text raises questions about genre,
authorship, the English vernacular, and the limits of fiction. Although our critical attention is
often most frequently directed at the drama and poetry of the Renaissance, scholarship in
recent years has been highly sensitive to the prose fiction of this period, not only because it
can be read as the forerunner of the modern novel, but because it is sophisticated,
innovative, and experimental in its own right.
ENGL20038 Modern Medievalisms
Unit Director: Dr Kate McClune
TB1
This unit focuses on contemporary creative engagements with medieval literature and
culture, such as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983), Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The
Seeing Stone (2000), and Karen Maitland’s Company of Liars (2008). We will analyse novels,
poems, and films which rewrite or re-envisage medieval narratives and the medieval world,
using medieval texts as a basis for comparison. We will be especially concerned with
questions of representation and interpretation of the medieval, and the ways in which reimaginings are themselves responsive to contemporary, as well as medieval, cultural
contexts.
ENGL29026 Darkest London
Unit Director: Dr Samantha Matthews
TB1
London has been visited by disaster many times, both in real and fictional forms. Plague,
fire, war, crime, terrorism, hardship and homelessness are recurring motifs in
representations of the city, whether as responses to historical events or fantasies of
destruction and renewal. Yet perversely even when the city is prosperous, powerful and
secure, it condemns and destroys many of its citizens. Ranging from Daniel Defoe's A Journal
of the Plague Year (1722), one of the first works of 'docu-fiction', to the apocalyptic gangster
film The Long Good Friday (dir. John Mackenzie, 1981), the unit studies works by writers,
film-makers, and artists who have created some of the most powerful and imaginative
responses to life, death and disaster in the 'Great Wen' since the Plague (1665) and Great
Fire of London (1666).
Aims:
 To give students knowledge of a range of works from different periods and in
different genres which focus on London as infernal, apocalyptic or benighted;
 To equip students with appropriate literary, theoretical, socio-historical,
topographical and other contexts to enable an informed understanding of the
primary texts;
 To engage with the creative psychology of writings which represent London as
plague-stricken, burning, bombed, or threatened by the 'secret agents' of terrorism;
 To practice skills of close analysis and critical argument informed by relevant
contexts in oral and written forms.
ENGL29010 Elegy
Unit Director: Dr Anne Baden-Daintree
TB1
This unit considers poetry of grief and mourning from the Middle Ages to the present day,
and will provide an overview of the some of the most influential elegies and elegists. There
will also be a strong focus on contemporary poetry, and we will explore the ways in which
more recent English and American poets react against the conventions of the English elegiac
tradition, and the reasons why elegy engages so persistently with such formal concerns.
Much critical work on elegy is based on psychoanalytical approaches to bereavement and
mourning, so, in addition to literary criticism, reading might include authors such as Freud,
Klein, Abraham and Torok, together with psychoanalytical studies of grief and loss (Bowlby,
Kübler-Ross). Some seminars will place earlier elegies alongside modern counterparts;
others will take a more thematic approach, considering, for example, AIDS memoir and
elegy, or the pastoral elegy. There will also be the opportunity to consider the interactions
of the elegiac genre with other poetic and literary forms, and with other aspects of visual
and material culture.
ENGL29027 The Uncanny
Unit Director: Professor David Punter
TB1
This unit will introduce students to the concept of the uncanny and its relation to literary
texts. A wide variety of texts will be read, ranging from Hamlet to Lewis Carroll, from
Coleridge to Dickens, from Poe to Virginia Woolf. There will also be opportunities to look at
some visual material and videos, as well as examining major theories of the uncanny from
Freud onwards.
Aims:
To develop an understanding of the concept of the uncanny, and to reflect, through clear
textual study, on the centrality of the uncanny to the meaning of literature.
ENGL20020 Literature and the Sea: The Seafarer to The Shipping News
Unit Director: Dr Laurence Publicover
TB1
From The Odyssey onwards, the sea has afforded inspiration for a rich and strange subgenre of literature: poems, plays, and novels have contemplated the seas mystery and
depth; recorded the terrors and excitements of voyaging across its surface; and attempted
to understand its attractions. Additionally, when authors confront the secretive, alien, and
unfathomable oceans, they often do so in order to ask questions about themselves.
On this course, which engages a cutting-edge area of critical study (sometimes dubbed The
New Thalassology), we will examine some of the finest sea-writing in English. Beginning
within the medieval period, and moving chronologically through Shakespearean drama,
Romantic poetry, nineteenth-century novels, and twentieth-century texts, we will study
with writers who, despite being in many respects very different, share a fascination with,
and a desire to understand, the sea. Authors covered will include Shakespeare, Marvell,
Byron, Coleridge, Melville, Tennyson, Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Plath, Rich, and Proulx.
ENGL20031 18th Century Women’s Writing
Unit Director: Dr Jennifer Batt
TB1
On this unit we will explore writing by women in the long eighteenth century (c. 1680-1800).
Considering the poetry, drama, and prose of writers such as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Wollstonecraft, we will examine women's literary
responses to a range of pressing public and personal subjects, including friendship; love, sex
and marriage; the female body; education; politics; class; and slavery. We will be concerned
with exploring the place of women writers in literary history: what did female authors write
about, and who were they writing for? Is there such a thing as 'women's writing'? In what
ways did women writers contribute to the rise of the novel, how successful were they in
writing for the stage, how influential was their verse, and what impact did their writing have
on political debates? And finally, how have critics from Virginia Woolf onwards understood
eighteenth-century women's writing?
ENGL20040 Creative Writing
Unit Director: Dr William Wootten
TB1
On this unit, we shall learn and practice the craft of poetry writing by studying and
endeavouring to master a range of traditional and modern poetic forms and techniques. We
shall attend to such matters as rhyme, repetition, metre, imagery, diction, punctuation, line
break, sonnet form, the different types of free verse and the similarities and differences
between song lyrics and poems. We shall be examining, and on occasion imitating, a wide
range of poetic examples, ancient and modern, from English and other literatures. So while
students will be encouraged to develop their own voice as poets, they should also be
prepared to attempt a variety of technically demanding exercises and to enter into
productive dialogue with poetic tradition. There will be considerable opportunity to discuss
and reflect critically upon students’ poetry throughout the course.
ENGL29022 Medieval to Renaissance
Unit Director: Professor Ad Putter
TB1
How different were literary approaches in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance? This
unit will compare the treatment of some major themes and narratives by medieval and by
Renaissance writers. In some cases we look at the same story in different versions: for
instance Chaucer's and Shakespeare's versions of the tragic love of Troilus and Criseyde,
Gower's and Shakespeare's versions of Apollonius and Pericles, Sir Thomas Wyatt's Tale of
the Country Mouse and the medieval animal fable that lies behind it. We will also have a
chance to look at writers who fall between the medieval and early modern divide, such as
John Skelton and Robert Henryson, and to look at medieval and early modern treatments of
similar themes, for instance death and possible damnation in Everyman and Marlowe's Dr
Faustus. Topics to be addressed will include the impact of the Reformation, responses to
classical narratives, court culture, and representations of women.
Aims:
The comparison of texts from the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period will allow
students to consider both changes and continuities in literary genres and themes, and in
attitudes to women and to death, in relation to the political and religious changes of the
C16th on the literature of the period. They will increase their command of the literature and
language of the two periods, and through seminar discussion will develop their ability to
formulate questions about texts, to assess both primary and critical material, and to
construct and express coherent and sustained arguments, both in class discussion and in
written work.
ENGL20023 Dangerous Books
Unit Director: Mr Tom Sperlinger
TB1
Can works of literature only reflect society, or might they be a catalyst for reform? If a book
has an urgent political message, can it also become a lasting work of art? Why might a work
of literature be considered dangerous? In what circumstances are books banned? And
conversely, what does this tell us about the power of literature, including in consciousnessraising or as a form of protest or resistance? This unit will explore these questions and
others, through a reading of imaginative and non-fiction works from c. 1800 to 1980 that
might be thought to constitute a radical tradition. Texts to be studied will include fiction of
various kinds, including socially realist works and political allegories; essays and polemics;
and literary texts in English from other cultures, including apartheid South Africa.
ENGL2XXXX War Stories: Women Writers and Conflict from WWI to 9/11
Unit Director: Dr Rowena Kennedy-Epstein*
TB1
In 1939, Simone Weil wrote that ‘the true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is
force,’ and that force ‘is the very centre of human history.’ Writing about the Iliad as a
parable for the rise of fascism in Europe, her essay theorizes the centrality of violence in our
texts, images, and rhetoric. This unit examines how war is documented and represented in
works by 20th- and 21st-century women writers. We will ask, as they do, how far the
reproduction of war might lead to desensitization and the continuation of violence, and how
far it gives voice to the victims and challenges the mechanisms that cause war. We will
explore how representations of war have been used to critique and expose injustice,
advocate for peace, incite and condemn violence, draw the boundaries of nation and
gender, and collapse the public and private. We will pay particular attention to the
contradictory nature of war for women, as a site of both potential liberation and repression.
Primary texts studied include fiction, poetry, plays, autobiography, and journalism, and
works by writers across the global anglophone world, as we explore how modes of
representation change with the realities of war, from the trenches of WWI to drone strikes
in Afghanistan.
ENGL29023 Samuel Johnson
Unit Director: Dr Tom Mason
TB1
This unit examines Samuel Johnson's more substantial works, more or less in chronological
order, and revisits some of the books he discussed, including the plays of Shakespeare.
Attention is paid to his influence on writing by women (including Charlotte Lennox and Jane
Austen) and by men (including Oliver Goldsmith and George Crabbe), and to the relationship
between Johnson the writer and Johnson as described by others (including James Boswell,
Anna Seward, Hester Thrale and Fanny Burney). The central consideration, however, is
Johnson as a writer and as a thinker about writing, including the material circumstances of
writing.
Aims:
This course is designed to acquaint students with a significant part of the range of Johnson’s
writing in various forms: the tale, satire, translation, imitation, biography, the essay,
lexicography, textual editing, explanatory elucidation, travel writing, and literary-critical
debate.
ENGL20209 Critical Issues
Unit Director: Dr Stephen James
TB1
This unit is intended to enhance the sophistication and open-mindedness of students'
critical responses to literature by exploring the potential relevance of various theoretical
ideas to the reading of specific (primarily narrative) literary works. Topics studied may
include: the act of reading, the figure of the author, the nature of narrative, the construction
of character, metafiction, historical and cultural contexts, ideology, gender, tragedy,
comedy, the uncanny, post-colonialism, beginnings and endings.
The course aim is to familiarise students with the critical and theoretical vocabulary of, and
the concepts which are central to, some of the most influential schools of criticism and
theory in the twentieth century, such as narrative theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and postmodernism.
Period units running in Teaching Block 2
ENGL20201/ENGL20203 Literature 2 (1500-1700)
Unit Director: Dr Tamsin Badcoe
TB2
This unit focuses on the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Poets to be
studied might include Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Cowley, Marvell,
Milton, Rochester, or Dryden; dramatists might include Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, or
Middleton; prose writers might include Sidney, Bacon, or Bunyan.
Aims:
The aim of this unit is to give students a grounding in literature of the 16th and 17th
centuries; to give students an understanding of the distinctive qualities of literature of this
period; and to give students an understanding of the distinctive qualities of some important
writers of the period.
Optional units running in Teaching Block 2
ENGL20029 Scottish Literature
Unit Director: Dr Kate McClune
TB2
In this unit we will examine medieval, early modern and contemporary works of Scottish
literature, considering the extent to which overarching themes can be identified through
time. Recent scholarship focuses on the relationship in medieval texts between selfgovernance and hazardous emotional excess. We will examine whether such concerns
remain predominant after the Union, interrogating the importance of contemporary
political and historical contexts and their influences on literature. The shifting political
climate in contemporary Scotland will provide us with an opportunity to examine the
relationship between politics and literature.
ENGL20033 U.S. Postmodernist Fiction
Unit Director: Dr Andrew Blades*
TB2
Postmodernism is a notoriously slippery term. In this course we shall approach both the
notion of postmodernity a historical and cultural period usually seen as stretching from the
1960s to the 1990s and postmodernism a tentative grouping of ideas, themes, and stylistic
and narrative innovations from the perspective of U.S. fiction. Broken into four subsections
Breaking the Frame; Postmodernism and History; Technoculture and Other
Postmodernisms: Race, Ethnicity and Gender the course is designed to introduce students
to a full array of U.S. postmodernist fictions, and to suggest ways in which postmodernism
has developed. We will end by considering the waning influence of postmodernism in
American letters and the possible contours of postpostmodernism. Each week we will look
at a primary text and a secondary source which develops and complements ideas found in
the primary.
ENGL2XXXX Black British Literature
Unit Director: Dr Josie Gill*
TB2
This unit explores the writing of black Britons from 1948 to the present day. Considering
novels, poetry, plays, song lyrics and essays, we examine how writers have addressed a
range of topics including: the experience of immigration; race riots; the politics of Blackness;
identity and ancestry; multiculturalism; the post-racial; and the legacy of Empire. We will
explore how black writing has challenged conceptions of Britishness and British literature by
considering the following questions: What is ‘Black British Writing’? Is this a useful or valid
way to categorise the work of black writers? How has writing by black Britons been received
by the literary establishment? How have black writers represented the experience of
migration? What aesthetic and linguistic strategies have black writers used to resist racist
stereotypes?
ENGL29021 Arthurian Literature
Unit Director: Professor Ad Putter
TB2
This unit will focus on the Arthurian legend from early medieval to modern times. We begin
by considering the origins of the legend in Welsh tales and in Geoffrey of Monmouth's
History of the Kings of Britain, and then proceed to the first Arthurian romances by Chrétien
de Troyes. Medieval English versions to be considered are Malory's Morte Darthur and Sir
Launfal. As interesting as the original medieval legends are the post-medieval responses.
We will be focusing on Tennyson's Arthurian cycle, Idylls of the King, Mark Twain's parody A
Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, and the classic of children's literature, T.H.
White's The Sword in the Stone. We shall discuss issues such as the changing
characterisation of Arthur, the conflict of love and chivalry, the roles of religion and of
magic, representations of women, and the ways in which the Arthurian legend has been
both idealised and parodied.
Aims:
The aim of the unit is to give students a good grounding in Arthurian literature, medieval
and modern, and to develop skills in close reading and in comparative criticism.
ENGL29032 Paradise Lost: Inception and Reception
Unit Director: Dr Tom Mason
TB2
Love it or hate it, there can be no doubt that Paradise Lost is the most consequential poem
in English, many later writers regarding Milton as a poet who had extended the possibilities
of poetic attainment. One book (or so) is studied in detail each week. Particular attention is
paid (1) to Milton’s materials (including translations of Hebrew verse, Homer, Lucretius,
Virgil, and Ovid), and (2) to various poetical, crucial and scholarly responses of
contemporaries and successors, (including Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Joseph Addison,
Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Richard Bentley, Jonathan Richardson, Samuel Johnson, William
Cowper, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats,
Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and T.S. Eliot). The popular and critical success of
Paradise Lost is compared with some comparative failures (including poems by Abraham
Cowley, Samuel Wesley, and Richard Blackmore, and some attempts to render the poem in
heroic couplets or in prose).
ENGL20206 Gender, Desire and the Renaissance Stage
Unit Director: Dr Lesel Dawson
TB2
This course will examine the way in which gender and desire are represented in a wide
range of early modern plays. These depictions will be studied alongside a number of other
primary sources - such as conduct books, sumptuary laws, and tracts on witchcraft - to give
a sense of the historical conditions that gave rise to the plays, and will be analysed in
relation to current ideas within literary theory.
Aims:
The course will aim to investigate both early modern constructions of sexual difference and
desire, and the way in which these notions are conceptualised and articulated in different
schools of criticism. This unit intends to introduce students to a wide range of Renaissance
drama, in order to raise important issues in the historical construction and theoretical issues
surrounding ideas about gender.
ENGL20024 Travellers’ Tales
Unit Director: Dr Tamsin Badcoe
TB2
In this unit we will move between works of imaginative literature, non-fiction and
cartography, in order to consider how the late medieval and early modern geographical
imagination engages with both the global and the local. Recent scholarship has taken great
interest in how space and movement is represented and conceptualised in literature, and
the late medieval and early modern periods offer a rich terrain to explore. From the farranging questing of medieval romance and early accounts of the Holy Land, to reports of
precarious colonies established in Ireland and the New World, and later satires, this unit
explores the imaginative travails of texts and images which have travel and encounter at the
heart of their structure. We will look at a mixture of travellers’ tales as they appear in prose,
poetry and drama, and consider how literary engagements with geography shape our ideas
about home, exile, discovery and the wider world.
ENGL2XXXX Transatlantic Women Modernists
Unit Director: Dr Rowena Kennedy-Epstein*
TB2
This unit will look at the gender in and of modernism, on both sides of the Atlantic, paying
particular attention to the ways in which transatlantic literary and feminist networks shaped
the writing of the period. Many of the writers we will read were travellers or immigrants,
their lives and works shaped by the world wars and colonialism, and this sense of movement
will allow us to better understand the historical and political spaces the texts occupied, from
the cosmopolitan centres to the colonies. Considering poetry, prose, and reportage, we will
think about how formal conceits were developed to write about these shifting communities,
and to respond to changing notions of race, class, nation, and gender. We will ask what
makes these works ‘modern,’ exploring the influences on their writing of psychoanalysis,
women’s suffrage, access to birth-control, Marxist politics, and print culture.
ENGL20030 Writing the Working Classes
Unit Director: Dr Jennifer Batt
TB2
On this unit we will explore writing for, about, and by the working classes during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Considering novels by canonical authors such as
Gaskell and Dickens alongside prose and verse by agricultural labourers, domestic servants
and factory workers, we will examine the role played by imaginative writing in the making of
the working class. Questions we will address include: how - and why - do novelists and poets
write about work and the social order? What did working-class men and women write
about, and what impact did their writing have? How does this writing reflect an increasingly
politicised class, and to what extent was literature used to inspire radicalism or to quell
incipient revolution? What genres and what kinds of language appealed to writers exploring
working-class experiences? And finally, how have literary critics responded to this body of
work?
ENGL20032 Poetry of the 1960s
Unit Director: Dr William Wootten
TB2
On this unit, we shall examine English and American poetry of the 1960s, concentrating
upon the major volumes of that decade. Each week we shall examine a different book of
poetry. These will be drawn from across the range of different poetries that defined the
poetry of the 1960s and which have continued to influence poetry written in the years since.
Along with the opportunity to pay close attention to the works themselves, there will be the
chance to read the poetry in the light of a variety of illuminating contexts, be they social,
political, philosophical or biographical. We shall also look at the poetry of the sixties more
widely, at poetic movements such as confessionalism, beat poetry, projective verse and The
Movement, and at influential critical voices and anthologies.
ENGL2XXXXX Presenting the Future
Unit Director: Professor David Punter
TB2
This unit explores some of the ways in which literary texts have sought to envision the
future. Selected speculative fictions from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will be
studied with a view to examining the possibilities of relating fictions to their historical
contexts. There will be an emphasis on a continuing series of arguments about the nature
and uses of technology, as well as on the concept of modernity.
The unit aims to develop understanding of the ways in which literature mediates between
past, present and future. Students will be encouraged to seek connections between literary
presentations of the future and the deeper structure of fears, anxieties and expectations
which are encoded in the texts.
On completion of this unit, students will be expected to have deepened their understanding
of how literature treats the future; they will have been encouraged to speculate on ways in
which ‘imaginative writing’ actually constructs that future, in the sense that it creates a
series of metaphors without which we might be unable to understand it. The topic will thus
necessarily open up questions about the role literature plays in how we understand the
world, relations between the literary and the ideological, and the constitutive powers of the
cultural imagination.
ENGL29025 New England's Dreaming: American Literature from Emerson to James
Unit Director: Professor Daniel Karlin
TB2
The idea of America is a motivating force, and animating presence, in American literature
from its earliest period. This unit concentrates on how the answer to Crevecoeur’s famous
question, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), ‘What then is the American, this new
man?’ shapes the literature produced in New York and New England during the nineteenth
century by a group of exceptional writers and thinkers, beginning with Washington Irving
and concluding with Henry James. The literary and cultural ferment of American
Transcendentalism, the Abolitionist Movement, the reaction to progress and the expansion
of the frontier, the trauma of the Civil War, and the disenchantment of post-Civil War
society, all feature in the unit as significant contexts, but the focus will be on detailed
readings of novels, poems, essays, and works of criticism by the primary authors.
ENGL20028 The Fairy Tale in English
Unit Director: TBC*
TB2
The unit will survey the fairy tale in English from the 19th to the 21st century. We will survey
the first translations of fairy tale collections - of Perrault, the Grimms, and the Arabian
Nights and explore the context of the huge popularity of these tales in 19th century
England. We will go on to investigate their early reception and influence, including on novels
and tales written in English, before moving on to 20th and 21st century rewritings. We will
also spend some time on screen adaptations and their cultural impact. Detailed
consideration will be given to a range of critical approaches including structuralist,
psychoanalytical, feminist and Marxist readings. Close readings, comparing the language
and emphasis of different versions of the same story, will also be central to the unit.