M.A. Issues in Modern Culture Reading List 2019–20

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M.A. Issues in Modern Culture

Reading List 2019–20

AUTUMN TERM AUTHORS

Walter Pater

Professor Matthew Beaumont

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (OUP, 2010), esp. the Preface, the Conclusion, the chapters on Michelangelo and Leonardo, and the Appendices on Giorgione and ‘Diapheneite’.

Further Reading: Laurel Brake, Walter Pater (Northcote House, 1994) L. Brake & I. Small, eds, Pater in the 1990s (ELT, 1991) L. Brake et al., eds, Walter Pater: The Transparencies of Desire (ELT, 2002) Denis Donohue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (Knopf, 1995) Kate Hext, Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy (Edinburgh UP, 2013) Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism (Cornell UP, 2017)

Henry James

Professor Philip Horne

Henry James, In the Cage, in Selected Tales, ed. John Lyon, Penguin, 2001 The Turn of the Screw, in The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, ed. T. J. Lustig, OUP, 1998

Further Reading: John Carlos Rowe, Henry James and the Other Philip Horne. ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters

Sui Sin Far

Dr Xine Yao

Sui Sin Far, Mrs Spring Fragrance, ed. Hsuan L. Hsu (Broadview Press, 2011)

James Joyce

Dr Scarlett Baron

James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986) – available as a Vintage reprint.

This is the best critically edited text, but for a helpful introduction and useful notes (as well as for an interesting variant text), see Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

It can also be useful to have to hand

Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, ‘Ulysses’ Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (London: University of California Press (1989).

Further Reading:

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (the OUP edition has a good introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson). James Joyce, Dubliners (the OUP edition has a good introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson; I have written an introduction to the 2012 Vintage edition of the stories). James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).

Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (London: Faber and Faber, 1978). Terence Killeen, ‘Ulysses’ Unbound: A Reader’s Companion to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Dublin: Wordwell, 2005). Sean Latham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Virginia Woolf

Scarlett Baron

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway [1925], ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse [1927], ed. Margaret Drabble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Further reading

Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries (London: Vintage, 2008). Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters (London: Vintage, 2008). Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, rev. Hermione Lee (London: Pimlico, 2002).

Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Julia Briggs, Reading Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977). Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997). Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: CUP, 2000).

Katherine Mansfield

Dr Dennis Duncan

Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Penguin, 2007)

Further Reading:

Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Todd Martin (ed), Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group (London: Bloomsbury, 2017)

Henry Green

Dr Julia Jordan

Henry Green, Party Going (Vintage, 2001) [1939]

Further Reading

Thomas S. Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (Columbia, 2016)

Jonathan Foltz, 'Henry Green and the Infinitely Remote', in The Novel after Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy (OUP, 2018)

Naomi Milthorpe, 'Things and Nothings: Henry Green and the Late Modernist Banal' Novel:A Forum on Fiction (2017) 50 (1): 97-111.

Nick Shepley, Class, Style, and the Everyday (OUP, 2016)

T.S. Eliot

Dr Dennis Duncan

‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – ‘Portrait of a Lady’ – ‘Preludes’ – ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ – ‘Gerontion’ – ‘Whispers of Immortality’ – The Waste Land – ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ – Four Quartets

All in Collected Poems (Faber) or The Poems of T.S. Eliot, Vol. 1 ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Faber)

Further Reading: Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (ed. Frank Kermode) The Letters of T.S. Eliot (Vols. 1-6)

Ackroyd, Peter, T.S. Eliot (1984) Asher, Kenneth, T.S. Eliot and Ideology (1998) Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. T.S. Eliot, Four quartets : a casebook (1994) Bush, Ronald, ed. T.S. Eliot: the Modernist in History (1991) Cooper, John Xiros, ed., The Cambridge introduction to T.S. Eliot (2006) Donoghue, Denis, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (2000) Ellmann, Maud The poetics of impersonality : T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (1987) Gordon, Lyndall, Eliot’s Early Years (1977) Julius, Anthony, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995) Laity, Cassandra, and Nancy. K. Gish, eds. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T.S. Eliot, (2004) Moody, David, Tracing T.S. Eliot’s spirit : essays on his poetry and thought (1996) Murphy, Russell Elliott, Critical companion to T.S. Eliot : a literary reference to his life and work (2007) Raine, Craig, T.S. Eliot (2006) Rainey, Lawrence, Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ (2005) Ricks, Christopher, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1994) Schuchard, Ronald, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (1999) Sigg, Eric W., The American T.S. Eliot : a study of the early writings (1989) Southam, B.C., A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot (1968)

Samuel Beckett

Dr Julia Jordan

Samuel Beckett, Molloy (London: Faber, 2009)

Further Reading: Chris Ackerley and Stanley E. Gontarski, eds., The Grove Companion To Samuel Beckett (2004) Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text (Davies Group, 2007) _____. Beckett, Modernism, and the Material Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014) Dirk Van Hulle, ed., The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) [This should be read in tandem, ideally, with the 1994 version edited by John Pilling.] Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993)

10.

Alfred Hitchcock

Professor Philip Horne

Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Rear Window (1954)

Further Viewing: Rebecca (1940) Spellbound (1945); Notorious (1946) Strangers on a Train (1951) Rear Window (1954) The Wrong Man (1957) Vertigo (1958); North by Northwest (1959) Psycho (1960) The Birds (1963) Marnie (1964) Frenzy (1972) Family Plot (1976)

Further Reading: Richard Allen & S. Ishi Gonzalès, Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (bfi Publishing, London 1999). Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (A Movie Book: Cameron and Hollis, Moffat (Scotland), 1999). Jonathan Coe, James Stewart, Leading Man (Bloomsbury: London, 1994). Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (Faber: London, 1974) Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (University of California Press: London, 1995). Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (2003) Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (Methuen: London & New York, 1988) Eric Rohmer & Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (Ungar: New York, 1979; first published as Hitchcock (Presses Universitaires: Paris, 1957)) Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (W.H. Allen: London, 1977) Donald Spoto, Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius (Collins: London, 1983) John Russell Taylor, The Life and Work of Alfred Hitchcock (Faber: London, 1978) François Truffaut, Hitchcock [1968] (Granada, 1978) Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited [a revision of the 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films] (Columbia University Press, 1989

‘The MacGuffin’ webpage, ed. Ken Mogg (‘Alfred Hitchcock Scholars Meet Here!’): links to many sources: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/ The Internet Movie Data Base, of course: www.imdb.com CONTEXTS: MODERNITY AND THE CITY

Modernity and the City

Dr Julia Jordan

The purpose of this seminar is somewhat introductory to ‘Contexts’ as a whole; I have asked you to read some of the seminal Baudelaire metropolitan texts, and to look at some Sophie Calle. I will also likely distribute some other poems for close-reading in the seminar, ones that shed light on the particular intersection between urban encounter, sexuality and chance that will form the central topic of discussion. (It’s not that crucial whether you read the Baudelaire texts in French or English, and differences in translations, far from being avoided, may be in fact be worth raising for discussion. The primary aim of the seminar will be to think about these writers/artists as thinkers about the city and modernity.)

Primary Reading: Charles Baudelaire, ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ (Poems LXXXVI-CIII) from Les Fleurs du Mal, ed. by E. Starkie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959). The English/French parallel text is worth having, and is available in Selected Poems ed. Carol Clark (Penguin), or The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993). This latter has the advantage of an introduction by Jonathan Culler.

Sophie Calle, Double Game (Violette Editions, 2007). This text is quite expensive, but some of it is available online: http://www.reflexionesmarginales.com/biblioteca/15/Lit/6.pdf and http://scottbankert.net/UrbanArtsParis/Readings/Additional%20Readings/Sophie %20Calle_The%20Detective.pdf ]

Poems to be close-read in class will be circulated: ‘To a Passer-by’ by Baudelaire; (https://fleursdumal.org/poem/224), ‘The Day Lady Died’ by Frank O’Hara, and T.S. Eliot’s ‘Preludes’.

If possible, please also read: Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern Life and other essays (London: Phaidon, 2001).

Further Reading (not necessary for the class, but may be of interest if you choose to pursue the topic further): Walter Benjamin, ‘The Flâneur’ from Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso Books). Rachel Bowlby, ‘Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flâneuse’, in Still Crazy After All these Years (London: Routledge, 1992). Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (MIT Press, 1997) Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: the (Feminine) Art of Walking in Cities (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016)

Underworlds

Dr Owen Holland

Henry James,The Princess Casamassima (1886) From Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999): sections C, 'Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris' (pp. 82–100) and k, 'The Commune' (pp. 788–795) from 'Convolutes'

Further Reading: John Kimmey, Henry James and London: The City in his Fiction (Oxford: Peter Lang, 1991) Vesna Kuiken, '1884: The Princess Casamassima, Anarchy, and Henry James's Materialist Poetics', The Henry James Review 38:2 (Spring 2017), 113-133 David Pike, Subterranean Cities The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800- 1945 (Cornell University Press, 2005) Mark Seltzer, 'The Princess Casamassima: Realism and the Fantasy of Surveillance', Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35:4 (March 1981), 506-534

Early Cinema and the City: City Symphonies

Professor Matthew Beaumont

There will be a screening of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera before the seminar (time and place to be confirmed), and readings (from Vertov, Eisenstein, Trotsky, and others) will be distributed.

Further Reading: Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant Garde (University of Minnesota Press, 1984) Christopher Butler, Early Modernism (OUP, 1994) Steve Edwards and Paul Wood (eds), Art of the Avant-Gardes (Yale UP, 2004) Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism (CUP, 2005) Graham Roberts, The Man with a Movie Camera (IB Tauris, 2000)

The Wireless Imagination

Dr Dennis Duncan

Virginia Woolf, “Craftmanship”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcbY04JrMaU Louis MacNeice, “The Dark Tower”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjVkmo1b_fo Samuel Beckett, “All that Fall”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY22jmHAS5E

Further Reading: Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics and the BBC, 1922-38 (Ashgate, 2007) Debra Rae Cohen et al., Broadcasting Modernism (University Press of Florida, 2013) Douglas Kahn (ed.), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT, 1994)

Hauntings

Dr Owen Holland

Margaret Oliphant, A Beleaguered City (1880), in A Beleaguered City And Other Tales Of The Seen And The Unseen, ed. Jenni Calder (Canongate) Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1993)

Filming New York

Professor Philip Horne

Films by Martin Scorsese Taxi Driver (1976) The King of Comedy (1983)

Further Viewing: Mean Streets (1974) Italianamerican (1974) New York, New York (1977) Raging Bull (1980) After Hours (1985) GoodFellas (1990) Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

Further Reading: Peter Brunette (ed.), Martin Scorsese Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999) Ian Christie and David Thompson (eds), Scorsese on Scorsese (Faber, 2003) Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver, screenplay (Faber, 1990) Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California, 1972) Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (Faber 1999; book of excellent long documentary) Martin Scorsese & Nicholas Pileggi, Goodfellas (script), Faber Amy Taubin, Taxi Driver (London: British Film Institute, 2000) Michael Henry Wilson, Scorsese on Scorsese (Cahiers du Cinéma, 2011) Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver (script) (Faber) Amy Taubin, Taxi Driver (BFI Modern Classics) Paul A. Woods (ed.), Scorsese: A Journey through the American Psyche (Plexus) For early script for The King of Comedy, see http://sfy.ru/sfy.html?script=king_of_comedy

TV and the City: The Wire

Professor Matthew Beaumont

David Simon et al., The Wire, Season One (13 episodes, 2002)

Further Viewing: The Wire, Seasons 2-5 (47 episodes, 2003-2008)

Further Reading: Alvarez, Rafael, The Wire: Truth Be Told (Canongate, 2009) Anderson, P.A., ‘“The Game Is the Game”: Tautology and Allegory in The Wire,’ Criticism, 52.3 (2010): 373-98 Jameson, Fredric, ‘Realism and Utopia in The Wire,’ Criticism, 52.3-4 (2010): 359-372 Klein, A. A. (2009) ‘“The Dickensian Aspect”: Melodrama, Viewer Engagement and the Socially Conscious Text’; in T. Potter and C.W. Marshall (eds), The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, (Continuum, 2009), 177-189 Marshall, C.W. and Potter, T., ‘“I am the American Dream”: Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction,’ in Marshall and Potter (eds), The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, (Continuum, 2009), 1-14. Simon, David, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (Canongate, 1991)

Print Culture

Dr Dennis Duncan

Ezra Pound, “Small Magazines” (available online here: https://library.brown.edu/cds/mjp/pdf/smallmagazines.pdf)

Further Reading:

Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey, Modernism’s Print Cultures (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) Patrick Collier, Modern Print Artefacts (Edinburgh: EUP, 2016) Lise Jaillant, Cheap Modernism (Edinburgh, EUP, 2017) 9.

Psychogeography

Professor Matthew Beaumont

Iain Sinclair, The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City (2017)

Further reading

Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (2010) Guy Debord, 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography' (1955) Will Self, Psychogeography (2007) Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (1997) Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000)

10.

Blackness and the City

Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao

Nella Larsen, Passing Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Further Reading: William A Gleason, Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”

SPRING TERM AUTHORS

Patricia Highsmith

Dr Matthew Sperling

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)

Further Reading and Viewing: Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950), The Price of Salt (1952; later re-issued as Carol), Deep Water (1957), The Cry of the Owl (1962), Those Who Walk Away (1967), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974) Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (2009) Film adaptations: Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Strangers on a Train (1952); René Clément (dir.), Purple Noon [Plein Soleil] (1960); Wim Wenders (dir.), The American Friend (1977); Anthony Minghella (dir.), The Talented Mr Ripley (1999); Liliana Cavani (dir.), Ripley’s Game (2002); Todd Haynes (dir.), Carol (2015)

Sylvia Plath

Dr Linda Freedman

Collected Poems (Faber 1981)

Further Reading: The Bell Jar (1966) Journals 1950-1962, ed. Karen v Kukil (2000) Letters Home: correspondence 1950-1963 ed. Aurelia Plath (1977) Birthday Letters ed. Ted Hughes (1998) Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and other prose writings (1979)

Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989) Jaqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991) Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman (1994) Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002) Sylvia Plath edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (1989) Christina Britzolakis, Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (1999) The Unravelling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath ed. By Anita Helle (2007) Linda Freedman, ‘Plath and the ‘blessed, glossy New Yorker’ in Writing for the New Yorker ed. Fiona Green (2015) Marta Figlerowicz, ‘Thresholds: Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath’, Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature (Cornell University Press, 2017), pp.20-43.

James Baldwin

Dr Nick Spengler

Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Further reading

Ta-Nehisi Coates, 'Letter to My Son'. The Atlantic. July 4, 2015 Robert Tomlinson, '"Payin' One's Dues": Expatriation as Personal Experience and Paradigm in the Works of James Baldwin'. African American Review. Spring 1999 (33.1)

Ann Quin

Dr Julia Jordan

Ann Quin, Berg (John Calder, 1964).

Further Reading:

Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

Toni Morrison

Dr Hugh Stevens

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 1977. Recommended edition: Vintage edition, with Morrison’s own introduction.

Further Reading:

Harold Bloom, ed., Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999). Jan Furman, ed., Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) Carmen Gillespie, Critical Companion to Toni Morrison: A Literary Reference to her Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2008). Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991) Nellie Y. McKay, ed., Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988) Tessa Roynon, The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Valerie Smith, ed., New Essays on Song of Solomon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed., Conversations with Toni Morrison (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1994)

Octavia Butler

Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao

Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)

Further Reading:

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (1997)

J.M. Coetzee

Dr Scarlett Baron

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace [1999] (London: Vintage, 2000). J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year [2007] (London: Vintage, 2008).

Further reading

J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992). J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense [sic]: Essays on Censorship (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). J.M. Coetzee, Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005 (London: Vintage, 2008). J.M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 (London: Vintage, 2002).

Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee & the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). Patrick Hayes, J.M. Coetzee and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Jarad Zimbler, J.M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Alison Bechdel

Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006)

Further Reading:

Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling (2003) Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (1993)

10.

Alan Hollinghurst

Dr Scarlett Baron

Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

Further Reading

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004) Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star (1994) Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (2011) Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair (2017) Alan Hollinghurst, The Spell (1998)

Les Brookes, Gay Male Fiction since Stonewall: Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge, 2009).

Ross Chambers, ‘Messing Around: Gayness and Loiterature in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library’ in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, ed. Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

Lawrence Driscoll, Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Allan Johnson, Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Michele Mendelssohn and Denis Flannery (eds), Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

Peter Terzian, ‘Alan Hollinghurst: The Art of Fiction No. 214’ (interview), The Paris Review (2011), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6116/the-art-of- fiction-no-214-alanhollinghurst

SPECIAL TOPICS

Psychoanalysis and Modern Culture

Dr Benjamin Dawson

Preparation: Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents (1929), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (SE) 21, Pelican Freud 12, OR Penguin Classic edition by Leo Bersani

1. INTRODUCTION: CULTURE and MASS PSYCHOLOGY Freud, ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907) SE 9 Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) SE 18, Chapters 7 and 8, Pelican Freud 12, also in Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the I, Penguin Classic edited by J. Rose. Wilfred Bion, ‘Group Dynamics’ (1952), in Experiences in Groups (London: Routledge, 1989)

2. ENCRYPTION and DECODING Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Gold Bug’ (1843) any edition Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter 6 'The Dream Work', SE 4 (or any recent translation (i.e. OUP, Penguin), §§ (a) The Work of Condensation, (b) The Work of Displacement, (c) The Means of Representation in Dreams, (d) Considerations of Representability, and (i) Secondary Revision. (NB. in the OUP translation of the original 1900 edition, 'Secondary Revision' is §(h)) ‘Submarine Telegraphy’, Scientific American vol. LXXI, no. 8 (Aug 25. 1894), 122

Optional: James Joyce, ‘Circe’, Ulysses (1922) OR Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928), ed. Michael Whitworth (OUP, 2015), Chapter 6 (pp. 153- 191)

3. ANXIETY and DANGER Otto Rank, ‘Infantile Anxiety’ (1924), in The Trauma of Birth (London: Kegan Paul, 1929) Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), SE 20 Franz Kafka, ‘The Burrow’, (written 1923-4; published 1928) trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Complete Short Stories (London: Vintage, 1999), pp. 325-359 Ernst Junger, ‘On Danger’ (1931), New German Critique 59 (1993), 27-32

4. WAR and MASCULINITY Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Time on War and Death’ (1915) & ‘On Transience’ (1915) Freud, ‘Why War?’ (1933), SE 14 and 22, Pelican Freud, 12 Joan Rivière, ‘Hate, Greed, and Aggression’ (1937), in Joan Rivière and Melanie Klein, Love, Hate and Reparation (Norton, 1964) Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938), ed. Michèle Barrett (Penguin, 2000)

5. MONOTHEISM and TRAUMA Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1934-38), SE 23, Pelican Freud 13, also in New Penguin Classic, Mass Psychology Leanne Howe, Savage Conversations (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2019) Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’ (1914), SE 12

Queer Literature, Queer Theories

Dr Hugh Stevens

This series of seminars will consider a range of works from the late nineteenth century that will help us think theoretically and historically about gender identities, about sexual identities, and about the relationship between gender and sexual desire. On the one hand there is a well-established history of same-sex desires and ‘homosexual’ identities. On the other hand we are becoming ever more aware of a history of gender identities that challenge the binary between masculinity and femininity. Is there a relastionship between sexual dissidence and gender dissidence? These are big questions, and we probably won’t get around to answering them, but we will at least ask them! Every week we will try and explore relationships between literary material and political and theoretical questions. A fuller reading list will be available in the Autumn term.

Week One: Closet. Today we consider two American fictions that have been read in relation to the ‘closet’ – Herman Melville’s short novel or novella, Billy Budd (begun in 1888, but first published posthumously in 1924) and Henry James’s short story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903), and we will ask why these works spoke so powerfully to queer critics in the 1980s and the 1990s. What was the ‘closet’, and how did it shape the expression and constitution of sexual identities. How is it possible to write a novel about a sexual identity when that sexual identity remains a secret? What kinds of relationships between visibility and silence are created by the closet?

Primary reading: (I recommend editions below but do feel free to use other editions) Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, in Billy Budd, Bartleby and Other Stories, ed. Peter Corviello, Penguin, 1997. Henry James, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, in Henry James, Selected Tales, ed. John Lyon, Penguin, 2001. Extra reading: Other fiction: Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1990. Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, 1998.

Week Two: Coming Out. Primary reading: E. M. Forster, Maurice, ed. P. N. Furbank, Penguin, 1971 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, ed. Esther Saxey, Wordsworth, 2015

Week Three: Queer at the Movies Viewing: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) Paris Is Burning (1991)

Week Four: AIDS: Drama and Activism Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1993)

Week Five: New Formations. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015) 3.

Chance and the Avant Garde: Accident, Error and Catastrophe in Literature and Culture from 1960 to the present.

Dr Julia Jordan

WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION: ALEATORY NARRATIVE. Please read B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates and listen to John Cage, Music of Changes [on YouTube]

WEEK 2: LUDIC LITERATURE. Please read Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; images and text from Sophie Calle, Double Game provided in class, as the book is quite expensive!

WEEK 3: ACCIDENTAL TEXTS I. Please read Brigid Brophy, In Transit.

WEEK 4: ACCIDENTAL TEXTS II. Please read J. G. Ballard, Crash.

WEEK 5: 21ST CENTURY CATASTROPHE. Please read Tom McCarthy, Remainder; and listen to William Basinski, Disintegration Loops [available on YouTube, please listen in advance]

Metaphors of chance and the accidental can be said to dominate the post-’45 period of literature and art. In a postwar period characterized by fragmentation, with a backdrop of the new science of uncertainty and the emergence of chaos theory, scientific and cultural disciplines move towards an interest in the competing forces of order and disorder. Indeed, postmodernism itself can be understood as part of this shift, as culture moves away from a modernist mourning for lost meaning and instead begins to articulate an affinity with indeterminism and uncertainty. Novels are broken up to become shuffleable; in the visual arts artists work with found objects, and with paint thrown randomly onto canvases; John Cage and Samuel Beckett let the accidental determine the precepts of their artistic composition. In the period from 1960s to the present, then, chance and the accident become fundamental to cultural production, and this course will investigate the extent to which this is particularly true of post-1960 literature and literary theory. We will read texts that take aleatory precepts as central organizing factors (the shuffleable narrative of B.S. Johnson, the ludic experimentation of Nabokov and Calle, the collisions, crashes and catastrophes of Brophy and McCarthy) and explore concepts such as jouissance and the clinamen. In doing so we will discuss the extent to which the commonly held crisis of representation that seems to take place in this period is fundamentally a crisis of uncertainty, as Robert Coover writes: ‘All of us today are keenly aware that we are undergoing a radical shift in sensibilities. We are no longer convinced of the nature of things, of design as justification. Everything seems itself random.’

Further Reading Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (London: Hill & Wang, 1980) Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) Joseph M Conte, Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002) Jacques Derrida, ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies’, in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, eds. Joseph H Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) Raymond Federman, Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (New York: SUNY Press, 1993) Ross Hamilton, Accident (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007) Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) Jerry A. Varsava, Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader (Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1990). Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (London: Polity Press, 2005) Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (University of California Press, 2004)

Metafiction and the Novel After 1945

Dr Andrew Dean

‘Novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of the Author.’ So said John Barth about some of his own writing. ‘If this sort of thing sounds unpleasantly decadent,’ he continues, ‘nevertheless it’s about where the genre began, with Quixote imitating Amidis of Gaul, Cervantes pretending to be Cid Hamete Benengeli (and Alonso Quijano pretending to be Don Quixote […].’ Barth’s reminder that the novel has its roots in metafiction reorients the common-sensical accounts we may carry around with us about the history of the form. Here, it is not realism, but rather metafiction, that signals the emergence of the novel. It is a perspective that, to say the least, challenges the claims that have been made on behalf of that endlessly debated genre of writing, ‘postmodern metafiction.’ For those who think that self- reference represents the final victory of a particular moment in capitalism, or that it makes the form newly responsible to the historically marginalized, or that it has any determinate position at all – the longer history of metafiction will forever be a difficult problem to navigate.

In this option we will seek to understand the origins, poetics, and potential value of a distinctive – but anything but unique – global form of writing that became particularly prestigious after 1945. In the first two weeks we will examine the critical reception of ‘postmodern metafiction,’ consider well-known examples of such writing, and develop a language for addressing different kinds of metafictional endeavour. In the remaining weeks, we will be examining in particular the careers of three major metafictional authors, whose work only fits obliquely into the genre – Philip Roth, Janet Frame, and J. M. Coetzee. Reading deeply into the careers, we will be able to draw out the different possibilities and achievements of such writing, as well as how it might help authors to address issues specific to their oeuvre and writing contexts. What emerges is a much more variegated understanding of self-reference in the novel after 1945.

Week 1: Introduction

Reading:

1) It would help to have read widely in the history of the novel, and particularly works that might be considered to be ‘metafictional’. By way of introduction, read one or more of the following texts that you have not already read. Please note that this reading will not be addressed directly in class.

Cervantes, Don Quixote; Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; Henry James, ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, ‘The Private Life’; Oscar Wilde, A Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘The Critic As Artist’; James Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Thomas Pynchon, V., The Crying of Lot 49.

2) The seminar will be divided into two sections. a) The critical reception of metafiction (critical reading to be provided). b) We will discuss selections from J. L. Borges’s Labyrinths and Don Quixote.

Week 2: The Heroic Moment of Metafiction

Reading: Barth, Lost in the Funhouse…

Criticism: selections from 1960s and early 1970s criticism, centring on Barth and Gass.

Week 3: Ghosts

Reading: Seminar discussion will focus on The Ghost Writer. It would help to have read Goodbye Columbus (selections), Portnoy’s Complaint, and The Facts. Selections from Roth’s early critical reception will be provided.

Week 4: Faces in the Water

Reading: Seminar discussion will focus on Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water and her autobiographies. It would help to have read ‘Jan Godfrey,’ Faces in the Water, and Living in the Maniototo. Selections from Frame’s early critical reception will be provided.

Week 5: Foes

Reading: Seminar discussion will focus on Life & Times of Michael K. It would help to have read: Dusklands, and selections from Coetzee’s criticism and essays in Doubling the Point. Some archival material will be provided. 5.

The Literature Machine

Dr Dennis Duncan

The idea of a machine that can write of its own accord goes back to Swift and beyond. However, in the wake of the cybernetic boom that followed the Second World War, it acquired a new urgency. In popular fiction, in avant-garde writing, and in the emerging fields of computing science and critical theory, the notion of the literature machine resonated powerfully at midcentury. This course will look at some of the key works that address the automation of the creative process along with its corollary, the author who cedes agency to procedures or constraints. Alongside these, we will read some of the ways in which the literature machine has been theorized, both at the time and subsequently.

Week 1: Precursors It would be a mistake to think that the literature machine arrived out of nowhere at the dawn of the modern computing era. In the first session we’ll consider some precursors, including the tables and volvelles of Ramón Llull’s Ars Magna, and the literature machines of Swift, Mallarmé, and Borges. Reading: Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Book to Come’, in The Book to Come, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003 [1959]), pp. 224-44; Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine’, in Borges, The Total Library: Non- Fiction, 1922-86, ed. by Eliot Weinberger, trans. by Esther Allen et al., (London: Penguin, 2001); Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (extract)

Week 2: Cybernetics This week, we’ll look at some of the theoretical underpinnings of the twentieth century literature machine, notably the link between cybernetics and structuralism. Reading: Roald Dahl, ‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’, in Dahl, The Great Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2001); Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’; Dennis Duncan, Oulipo and Modern Thought, chapter 1; Bernard Geoghegan, ‘From Information Theory to French Theory’.

Week 3: The Physical Book This week we’ll look at the physicality of the book itself and a variety of works which treat it—cutting it up, unbinding it, or defacing it—in order to produce a reading experience which goes beyond the agency of the original author. Reading: Raymond Queneau, One Hundred Million Million Poems, trans. by John Crombie (Paris: Kickshaws, 1983), or Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, trans. by Stanley Chapman in Oulipo Compendium (London: Atlas, 1998) [Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960)]. If you can’t track down a version of this, then have a look at Bev Rowe’s online version: http://www.bevrowe.info/Queneau/QueneauHome_v2.html. Tom Phillips, A Humument, 6th (‘final’) edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016)

Week 4: Constraint Self-imposed constraints on what an author can or can’t write are as old as rhyme and metre. But among the experimentalists of the 1960s they are ratcheted up to an almost impossible degree. A novel that denies itself the letter e: the author is almost squeezed out of the creative process. This week we’ll look at the shifting conceptions of authorial agency that underpin these experiments in restriction. Reading: Georges Perec, A Void, trans. by Gilbert Adair (London: Harvill, 1994 [1969]); Italo Calvino, ‘The Burning of the Abominable House’, in Calvino, Numbers in the Dark, trans. by Tim Parks (London: Penguin, 2009).

Week 5: Where Are We Now? In the age of neural networks and Big Data, treatments of the literature machine are notably darker than those we have seen so far. We’ll finish off by looking at the responses to a computer-generated poem published in an august literary journal, and at Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island which wonders whether the machine might not already be with us. Reading: Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (London: Vintage, 2016); ‘Zach Scholl’, ‘For the Bristlecone Snag’, The Archive (2011): 32-33

Selected Reading Roland Barthes, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, trans. by Lionel Duisit, New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 237-72. Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Book to Come’, in The Book to Come, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003 [1959]), pp. 224-44. Italo Calvino, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, in The Uses of Literature: Essays, trans. by Patrick Creagh (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), pp. 3-27. ———, ‘Prose and Anticombinatorics’, in Warron F. Motte (ed.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 143-52. Dennis Duncan, The Oulipo and Modern Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). ——— (ed.), Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016). Natalie Ferris, ‘“I think I Preferred it Abstract”: Christine Brooke-Rose and Visuality in the New Novel’, Textual Practice 32.2 (2018): 225-44. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, ‘From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus’, Critical Inquiry 38.1 (2011): 96-126. Christopher Johnson, ‘“French” Cybernetics’, French Studies 69.1 (2015): 96-126. Julia Jordan, Chance and the Modern British Novel: From Henry Green to Iris Murdoch (London: Continuum, 2010). ———, ‘Error and Experiment in the 1960s British Novel’, in Kate McLoughlin (ed.), British Literature in Transition, 1960-1980: Flower Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 35-49. Kaye Mitchell and Nonia Williams (eds), British Avant-garde Fiction of the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Contemporary Poetry

Dr Matthew Sperling

This module offers an introduction to some major voices in British and Irish poetry from the last few decades. Focussing on works by two writers per week, we will consider the relation of contemporary poetry to personal and social histories; to landscapes both urban and rural; to grief and remembrance; to fractures of identity that run along lines of class, race and gender; and to the nature of language and subjectivity. The module offers the opportunity to study the work of experimental writers as well as writers working in more traditional forms, and to engage with work that has received considerable scholarly attention alongside more recent work that has so far received very little. We will pay close attention to the linguistic and formal qualities of poems and to their social, historical and political contexts. We will also consider the importance of the ways in which writers are situated within literary culture, in relation to poetic movements and networks; to magazines and publishing houses; to educational institutions; and to literary prizes and the shaping of public reputations.

Week One: Archives of History Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (Penguin, 1998); collected with revisions in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 (Oxford, 2014) Jay Bernard, Surge (Chatto & Windus, 2019)

Week Two: Place / Space Roy Fisher, A Furnace (Oxford, 1986), collected in The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe, 2005) Alice Oswald, Dart (Faber & Faber, 2002)

Week Three: Speaking Selves Jo Shapcott, Phrase Book (Oxford, 1992), collected in Her Book: Poems 1988-98 (Faber & Faber, 2000) J.H. Prynne, Pearls that Were (Equipage, 1999), collected in Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015)

Week Four: Intersections Tony Harrison, V. (Bloodaxe, 1985), collected in Collected Poems (Penguin, 2016) Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015)

Week Five: Postmodern Elegies Paul Muldoon, ‘Incantata’ (1994), collected in Selected Poems 1968-2014 (Faber & Faber, 2017) Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), available online from the London Review of Books and collected in Say Something Back (Picador, 2016)

Selected Further Reading

Nigel Alderman and C.D. Blanton (ed.), Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) Neal Alexander and David Cooper (ed.), Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-War Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013) Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Ian Brinton (ed.), A Manner of Utterance: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009) Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry 1966–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Eric Falci, The Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald (ed.), Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004) John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson (ed.), The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000) Edward Larrissy, The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry 1945-2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Natalie Pollard, Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) Peter Robinson, Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Matthew Sperling, Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Michael Thurston and Nigel Alderman, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) David Wheatley, Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave, 2015) Heather H. Yeung, Spatial Engagement with Poetry (Palgrave, 2015)