MA in Literary Studies: Pathway in Comparative Literature & Criticism

What you'll study Core module Module title Credits. Studies in Comparative Literature & Criticism Studies in Comparative Literature & Criticism 30 credits

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.

30 credits.

You also take three option modules from the selection below.

Option modules Module title Credits. Theories of Literature & Culture Theories of Literature & Culture 30 credits

This core module for the pathway in ‘Modern Literary Theory’ surveys key currents in literary and cultural theory from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Beginning with the examination of shifting ideas and theories of the ‘literary’ in the module of the discipline’s development, it goes on to explore ten key thinkers and tendencies, starting with Nietzsche. These will include Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin and Adorno, Structuralism, Blanchot, Derrida, 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 you to focus on theoretical concepts in their own right. You will also be asked to consider the theoretical implications of the particular formal and stylistic choices made by the thinkers covered.

30 credits. Modern Literary Movements Modern Literary Movements 30 credits

This core module for the pathway in ‘Modern Literature’ surveys the most internationally significant trends, influences, and movements in European and American literature of the twentieth century (and potentially beyond), including the impacts of Bergson and Nietzsche, the ‘prophetic’ role of the modern poet, challenges to Realism, the schools of Expressionism, Surrealism, and Absurdism, the modernist disruption of literary conventions, aspects of writing on the Holocaust, and the emergence of poststructuralism, OULIPO and postmodernism. These developments are studied through the analysis of major representative texts either in English (e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses ) or in English translation (e.g. Gide’s L’Immoraliste ) within their relevant cultural contexts. We will read works by James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, Bertolt Brecht, W.H. Auden, Walter Benjamin, William Faulkner, Primo Levi, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Virginia Woolf.

Teaching Mode: Weekly lecture followed by 2-hour seminar.

30 credits. Literature of the Caribbean & its Diasporas Literature of the Caribbean & its Diasporas 30 credits

This core module for the pathway in Literature of the Caribbean & its Diasporas intensively surveys Caribbean and diaspora literatures to highlight significant movements relative to the social, political and historical contexts impacting upon these new literatures. We are interested to trace 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 literatures. 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)

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

30 credits. American Literature & Culture: Critical and Theoretical Concepts American Literature & Culture: Critical and Theoretical Concepts 30 credits

Nineteenth and twentieth century American literature sought to define the nation in the face of the fragmenting effects of modernity and postmodernity. The version of America that emerges from this literature – and in fact what makes this literature representative of that version of nation – depends very much on how it is read. Via competing readings of canonical American texts, this core module for the ‘American Literature & Culture’ pathway investigates how American critical and theoretical conceptions shape American literature, producing different “Americas”. Not only engaging you in a rigorous study of particular phases and applications of American literary criticism and theory, the module also consolidates your knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. An incisive knowledge of these literary and critical-theoretical histories provides a vital platform if you are embarking on the postgraduate pathway in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture.

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

30 credits. Nineteenth-Century Literature: Romanticisms Nineteenth-Century Literature: Romanticisms 30 credits

This core module for the 'Romantic and Victorian Literature and Culture' pathway of the MA in Comparative Literary Studies examines the current debate in nineteenth-century studies about connections between Romantic and Victorian literature and the persistence of a Romantic tradition throughout the century.

During this module, you'll be able to develop your interests in two key literary periods and to question the usefulness of traditional periodisation. In each seminar we will 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. We will study 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; versions of social and political radicalism in the wake of the French Revolution; publication in a changing literary marketplace; popular genres such as Gothic and sensation fiction.

A consideration of the figure of the poet 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 and a new kind of epic; literary representations of individual psychology and an increasing fascination with extreme mental states. We will examine the impact of scientific discoveries and philosophical and religious discourses on literary culture. We will relate English literature to its global context, exploring conceptions of nationalism and democracy in relation to cosmopolitanism, the construction of Europe in the nineteenth century, philhellenism, Orientalism and imperialism.

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

30 credits. Shakespeare and the Early Modern Shakespeare and the Early Modern 30 credits

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.

30 credits. Postmodernist Fiction Postmodernist Fiction 30 credits

This option focuses on the analysis of key novels published between 1941 and 1991. Disparate in many ways, the texts are united by their frequent placement within the flexible category of international ‘postmodernism’. We will be reading the novels alongside both literary-critical constructions of postmodernism(s) and broader theoretical accounts of postmodernity. The aim of the module is not to isolate a definition of ‘postmodernist fiction’ through which the novels should be read, but rather to explore a range of sometimes contradictory theoretical paradigms and textual practices. Areas of inquiry will include: the relationships between ‘modernist’, ‘postmodernist’ and ‘realist’ poetics; the politics of form; postmodernism and historiography; postmodernism and postcolonialism; feminism and postmodernism.

Texts will typically include: Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts; Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (The Beckett Trilogy); Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller; Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Salman Rushdie, Shame; Angela Carter, Wise Children. The module reader will be Patricia Waugh (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1992). Other important essays will be made available as handouts.

30 credits. Rewriting Sexualities Rewriting Sexualities 30 credits

This module will examine the relationship between narrative and sexual identity through focusing on a variety of narrative structures and their relationship to late 19th- and 20th-century constructions of selfhood and sexuality. We will examine genres such as the case study, autobiography, confession, the novel and poetry to test the hypothesis that modern sexual identity is produced by the imperative to “tell the truth of sex”. In addition to Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Fanon, Foucault and Butler, we will examine a selection of texts, which will be chosen with reference to students’ particular interests but which might include Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich or Jean Genet.

30 credits. Literature and Philosophy Literature and Philosophy 30 credits

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 a number of different perspectives. In particular, it will show how this preoccupation with literature is the consequence of modern philosophy’s ongoing interrogation of its own limits. Philosophers to be studied include Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot.

30 credits. Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Theory in Practice Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Theory in Practice 30 credits

This module will explore the varied voices of poetry in the United States from 1940 to the present. In its survey of distinctively American styles, it will also consider notable works of 'confessional' poetry, the New York school, the position of women poets, the thematics of history, and critical definitions of Americanness in poetry. Poets to be studied will include Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Mark Strand, and Charles Simic.

30 credits. Documenting America: The Photo Text 1910 to 1960 Documenting America: The Photo Text 1910 to 1960 30 credits

This module focuses on the importance of the documentary photo-text within 20th-century American photography and writing. The module traces the generic, political and aesthetic intersections in photo-textual collaborations, between writers and photographers, journalism and fiction, and how documentary writing was influenced by and participated in the theorisation of photography.

We will discuss - amongst other things - various ideas on the ontological nature of the photograph, the idea of documentarism and its status as a mimetic form of representation as well as an art-form, the issue of propaganda, representations of America in terms of iconographies, ideologies - both left and right-wing - and the fascination with the vernacular during the Depression Era and through to the Cold War. The aim is to simultaneously link these broad ideas with in-depth analysis of particular photo-texts. The module will therefore enable you to articulate the intersections between politics and aesthetics in the pre- and post-war period, the concept of the photo-text as a genre particular to the period, and in the process query the relevance of a photographic aesthetic as a modernist concept.

30 credits. Reading Freud: Love & its Vicissitudes Reading Freud: Love & its Vicissitudes 30 credits

'In what sense is psychoanalysis a theory of love?'. By way of close readings in his key texts on the subject, this module will explore how the enigma of love structures (and destabilises) Freud's model of the mind. As well as addressing classical Freudian questions such as the neuroses, transference, the drive, masochism and femininity, the module will examine the implications of the psychoanalytic model of love for theories of reading and interpretation. In what sense is love 'textual' as well as sexual? As well as focusing such issues through Freud, we will point to the various directions in post-Freudian psychoanalysis to which our chosen texts lead.

30 credits. Twenty-first Century American Fiction Twenty-first Century American Fiction 30 credits

Paying close attention to the relation between form, aesthetics and context, this module will question whether the 21st century marks a break, shift or radical departure from the preoccupations of late 20th-century American fiction. For example, has postmodernism been superseded, and, if so, by what? Are new cultural (literary) forms needed in the attempt to map more recent (globalising) shifts in capitalism and their social and cultural formations? Is the American fiction of the 21st century defined by other, more dramatic shifts that rupture the cultural and social fabric? In other words, the module will ask to what extent recent fiction can be considered post-traumatic or post-catastrophic after the events of 9/11.

On a similar note, this module will investigate whether the late 20th century’s obsession with memory and trauma is still registered in more recent fiction, and whether the act of witnessing trauma, directly or indirectly, still constitutes the public sphere. Where terrorism and a “war on terror” have drawn attention to American borders and their perceived permeability, this module wonders whether concepts of national identity are still valid or whether the 21st century has illuminated once again the global and transnational contexts in which American identity has been written. Moving from the transnational to the national to the particular, this module wonders whether performative concepts of race, gender, sexuality and class still have a purchase on the new century’s fiction and its writing of the 21st-century American body.

30 credits. Palestine & Postcolonialism Palestine & Postcolonialism 30 credits

‘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 Abebook to source out-of-print material, although every effort will be made to provide some stocks of each text in the