2014 – 2015

ENGLISH LITERATURE

THIRD YEAR OPTION COURSES

8 August 2014 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

SEMESTER ONE Page

 Body in Literature 3  Contemporary Irish Novel 5  Creative Writing: Poetry * 7  Edinburgh in Fiction * 9  Novel and Collapse of Humanism 11  Medicine in Literature 1 12  Modernism and the Market NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION 14  Working Class Representations * 16  Writing for Theatre * 17  Ideology & Literature NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION 19  Modernism & Empire 21  Gender & Theatrical Representation 23  Making of Modern Fantasy 25  Modern Scottish Fiction 27  Brecht & British Theatre NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION 29  Victorian Women Writing 30

SEMESTER TWO Page

 American Gothic 32  Creative Writing: Prose * 35  Medicine and Literature 2: Medical Ethics in Literature 37  Shakespeare’s Comedies: Identity & Illusion 40  Shakespeare Modes and Genres 42  Celtic Revivals* 46  Mystery & Horror* 48  Gothic* 50  Edinburgh in Fiction/Fiction in Edinburgh 52  American Innocence 55  Naturalist Fiction NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION 57  Reading Theory 58  Postcolonial Writing 60  Poetry & Northern Ireland NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION 63

* Courses with an asterisk have a Scottish emphasis.

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The Body in Literature

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Elsa Bouet

The human body has been depicted in a wide variety of different ways across a range of cultural and historical locations. It has been described, variously, as a biological entity, clothing for the soul, a site of cultural production, a psychosexual construct and a material encumbrance. Each of these different approaches brings with it a range of anthropological, political, theological and psychological discourses that explore and construct identities and subject positions. The body is at once a locus of invention and self-expression, and also an object of domination and control. In contemporary culture it is also located at the heart of debates about race, gender and sexuality. This course will consider the ways in which the human body has been a central object of discussion in literature from the Renaissance onwards. It will encourage students to explore the politics of bodily representation, in terms of both how the body has been depicted and how it has become a trope employed to figure wider social and philosophical ideas. They will also be asked to think about how the way the body is figured differs between genres of writing and across different historical periods.

Seminar Schedule Week 1 Language and the Body: Introduction

Week 2 The Body in Pieces: Torture and Terror William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

Week 3 Incarnation, Sexuality and the Soul: the Body and Religion John Donne and Andrew Marvell (from Norton Anthology, vol. 1)

Week 4 Scale and Science: Unmaking the World Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Week 5 Anatomy, Monstrosity and Perversity Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

Week 6 Darwinian Transformations Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

Week 7 Gender and Identity: do Bodies Matter? Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve

Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 9 Disruption and Disgust Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Week 10 Identity, Indeterminacy and Desire Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

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Week 11 Disguise, Destruction and Dehumanisation Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

Primary Texts: (Each of these must be purchased and read in advance of the relevant seminar – alternative editions of all of these texts are fine.) Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory, London: Macmillan / Abacus, 2000 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve, London: Virago, 1982 Alasdair Gray, Poor Things, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, London: Routledge, 1995 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992

Selected Secondary Reading Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, London: Routledge, 1994 Peter Brooks, Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone, 1984 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto Press, 1986 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, London: Routledge, 1992 Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen, eds, Death and Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indianna University Press, 1994 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995 Gabriel Josipovici, Writing and the Body, Brighton: Harvester, 1982 Mark Ledbetter, Victims and the Postmodern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body: an Ethic of Reading and Writing, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, London: Athlone, 1993 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge, 1962 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin, London: Routledge, 2004 Elaine Scarry, ed., The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; and AIDS and its Metaphors, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber, eds, Perspectives on the Body: the Intersection of Nature and Culture, London: Routledge, 1999

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The Contemporary Irish Novel: 1960 to the present

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Carole Jones

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course will explore representations of Ireland and Irishness in contemporary Irish novels. Famous for its literary tradition, since 1960 Ireland has gone through radical social and political transformation and writers have challenged established notions of Irish identity and questioned the limits and possibilities of what it means to be Irish. We will investigate how the contemporary Irish novel represents this change side by side with a concern for continuity with the traditions that have formed Irish identity; that is, the tension between innovation and tradition which characterises this writing. Starting with Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls which was banned in Ireland for its representation of young female experience, the course will examine literary strategies in fiction from the North and South, focusing on questions of identity regarding nationality, gender, faith, class and sexuality.

SEMINAR SCHEDULE

Week 1 Introduction; Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls (1960) Week 2 Jennifer Johnston, Shadows on Our Skin (1977) Week 3 Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy (1992) Week 4 Roddy Doyle, The Commitments (1987); Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) Week 5 John McGahern, Amongst Women (1990)

Week 6 Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle (1989) Week 7 Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (1996) Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 9 Emma Donoghue, Stir-Fry (1994)* Week 10 Deirdre Madden, One By One in the Darkness (1996) Week 11 'Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart (2013)' * Stir-Fry is out of print but may be available second-hand on Amazon.

PRIMARY TEXTS

Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls (1960) Jennifer Johnston, Shadows on Our Skin (1977) Roddy Doyle, The Commitments (1987) Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle (1989) Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy (1992) John McGahern, Amongst Women (1990) Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (1996)

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Deirdre Madden, One By One in the Darkness (1996) Emma Donoghue, Stir-Fry (1994) Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know (2012) Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart (2013)'

SELECTED GENERAL SECONDARY READING

Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press, 1997) Linden Peach, The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004) Rüdiger Imhof, The Modern Irish Novel (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2002) Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature Vol. II: 1890-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) Julia Carlson, Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Writer (Article 19: 1990) Jennifer M. Jeffers, The Irish Novel at the end of the 20th Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, (de-)constructing the North: Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003) Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed.), Irish Fiction Since the 1960s, Ulster Editions and Monographs (Colin Smythe Ltd, 2003) Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives of Modern Irish Culture (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988) Bill Lazenblatt, Northern Narratives (Newtonabbey: University of Ulster Press, 1999) David Lloyd, Anomolous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Liliput Press,1993) Edna Longley, ‘The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994) Liam Harte and Michael Parker (eds), Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) Kersti Tarien Powell, Irish Fiction [Continuum Introductions to Literary Genres] (Continuum, 2005)

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English Literature Third and Fourth Year Semester One Option Course

Creative Writing Part I: Poetry *

Course Organiser: Dr Alan Gillis

If we trace the etymological root of the word ‘poem’ we find its meaning to be a ‘thing made or created’. To be a poet is thus to be ‘a maker’. The aim of this course is to take a practical, hands-on approach to the making of poems. Each week we will discuss and explore differing components of poetic form, and of the crucial techniques involved in poetic composition, while students will also be asked to compose their own poems throughout the course. Weekly classes will effectively be split into two. The first hour will involve seminar discussion of formal techniques and ideas. For this, students will be given, via LEARN, a selection of poems to read as well as some critical writing that relates to each week’s theme. The second hour will be a workshop in which students, on a rotating basis, will be required to read their work-in-progress to class. ALGs will form a second, smaller workshop in which students participate weekly. As such, the giving and receiving of constructive feedback to and from peers is central to the course, and full participation in workshop and ALG discussion is essential. Emphasis will be placed on the personal development of each individual, but, to aid this, students will be encouraged to write new verse that reflects each week’s theme, if possible. All in all, the course is designed to provide a constructive and encouraging arena in which students can hone and improve their poetic skill, while gaining perspectives on the art form that will complement their literary study more broadly. It should be noted that the course involves formal assessment based on a portfolio of each student’s own poems.

Week 1 Introduction

Week 2 Sound & Rhythm

Week 3 Imagery

Week 4 Words & Tone

Week 5 Voice & Persona

Week 6 Repetition & Rhyme

Week 7 Line, Stanza & Shape

Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 9 Ellipsis & Continuity

Week 10 Making Strange & Being Clear

Week 11 A Sense of Perspective

Primary Text:

An anthology of modern and contemporary poetry is downloadable from LEARN. Students are encouraged to print this out, bind it, and use it as a conventional text book. But circa 15 poems will be itemized for reading each week, so they can also be printed week-by-week, as necessary.

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Recommended Reading:

Criticism Auden, W. H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. London: Faber, 1963. Bell, Julia, and Paul Magrs, eds. The Creative Writing Coursebook. London: Macmillan, 2001. Cook, Jon, ed. Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000. Blackwell. 2004. Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1951. Gross, Harvey. Sound and Form in Modern Poetry. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Herbert, W. N., and Matthew Hollis, eds. Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. Bloodaxe, 2000. Koch, Kenneth. Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. Touchstone, 1999. Lennard, John. The Poetry Handbook. 2nd ed. (Oxford UP, 2005). Morley, David. The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Nims, John Frederick. Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999. Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1954. Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 3rd ed. New York: Princeton University Press, 1993. Redmond, John. How to Write a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Strand, Mark, and Eavan Boland, eds. Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. Norton, 2000. Valéry, Paul. The Art of Poetry. New York: Vintage, 1958. Vendler, Helen. Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. New York: Bedford Books, 1997. Wainright, Jeffrey. Poetry: The Basics. Oxford: Routledge, 2004.

Anthologies Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry. University of California, 1999. Alvarez, Al, ed. The New Poetry. Penguin, 1962. _____, ed. The Faber Book of Modern European Poetry. Faber, 1992. Armitage, Simon, and Robert Crawford, eds. The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Penguin, 1998. Astley, Neil, ed. Poetry with an Edge. Bloodaxe, 1993. _____ ed. Staying Alive. Bloodaxe, 2002. _____ ed. Being Alive. Bloodaxe, 2004. _____ ed. Being Human. Bloodaxe, 2011. Bownas, Geoffrey and Anthony Thwaite, eds. The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse. Penguin, 1998. Burnett, Paula, ed. The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Penguin, 2005. Crotty, Patrick, ed. The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry. London: Penguin, 2010. Heaney, Seamus, and Ted Hughes, eds. The Rattle Bag. Faber, 1982. Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry. Norton, 1994. Hulse, Michael, David Kennedy, and David Morley, eds. The New Poetry. Bloodaxe, 1993. Keegan, Paul, ed. The New Penguin Book of English Verse. Penguin, 2000. Longley, Edna, ed. The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry. Bloodaxe, 2000. Lumsden, Roddy, ed. Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2010. O’Brien, Sean, ed. The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945. Picador, 1998. Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 2 vols., 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. Rees-Jones, Deryn, ed. Modern Women Poets. Bloodaxe, 2005. Shapcott, Jo, and Matthew Sweeney (eds.), Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times. (Faber, 1996). Swenson, Cole, and David St. John, eds. American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

8 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

Edinburgh in Fiction/Fiction in Edinburgh *

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Silvia Villa

This course will examine the city in history as represented in fiction in the particular case of Edinburgh, from the historical fiction of Scott, Hogg and Stevenson to the genre fiction of the last two decades. It will examine the construction of the city in these texts as a site of legal, religious, economic and cultural discourse. The extent to which civic identity both contributes to and competes with national identity will be a central theme, as will the internal division of the city along lines of religion, gender, and, especially, class.

Seminar Schedule

Week 1. Introduction; extracts from Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771)

Week 2. Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (1818)

Week 3. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

Week 4. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886); Catriona (1893)

Week 5. Eric Linklater, Magnus Merriman (1935)

Week 6. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

Week 7. David Daiches, Two Worlds (1956); Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae (1992)

Week 8. ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 9. Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993)

Week 10. Iain Banks, Complicity (1993)

Week 11. Ian Rankin, Set in Darkness (2000) and The Falls (2001)

Secondary Reading

Ambrosini, Richard and Richard Dury (eds.) Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Madison WI: Wisconsin University Press, 2006.

Bold, Alan (ed.). Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. London: Barnes and Noble, 1984.

Craig, Cairns. Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996.

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---. The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination. Edinburgh: EUP, 1999.

---. Iain Bank’s Complicity: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2002.

Duncan, Ian. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Hagemann, Susanne (ed.). Studies in Scottish Fiction, 1945 to the Present. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996.

Hynes, Joseph (ed.). Collected Essays on Muriel Spark. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992.

Jones, William B. (ed.) Robert Louis Stevenson Reconsidered: New Critical Perspectives. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2003.

Keen, Catherine and David Midgley (eds.). Imagining the City. 2 vols. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006.

Kim, Julie H. (ed.). Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story: Ten Essays. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2005.

McCraken-Flesher, Caroline. ‘“One City” of Fragments: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Second (Person) City through David Daiches’s Personal Eye.’ David Daiches: A Celebration of his Life and Work. Ed. William Baker and Michael Lister. Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2008.

Morace, Robert. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2001.

Wallace, Gavin and Randall Stevenson (ed.). The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. Edinburgh: EUP, 1993.

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The Novel and Collapse of Humanism

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Lee Spinks

This course examines the transition from the nineteenth-century 'realist' novel to the 'modern' novel of the late- nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses, in particular, upon the cultural and philosophical developments that helped to define and situate embryonic literary modernity. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between humanism and anti-humanism, text and empire, literature and decadence, and existentialism and the crisis of modern 'man'. Readings of individual novels will be supplemented by other perspectives drawn from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and the modern continental philosophical tradition. Some knowledge of Friedrich Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols may be useful for the first seminar.

Seminar Schedule

Week 1 Introduction Week 2 Middlemarch Week 3 Middlemarch Week 4 Madame Bovary Week 5 Notes From Underground Week 6 Death in Venice Week 7 Heart of Darkness Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 9 The Trial Week 10 A Passage to India

Primary Reading:

Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Twilight of the Idols Eliot, George Middlemarch Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Notes from Underground Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness Mann, Thomas Death in Venice Kafka, Franz The Trial Forster, E.M. A Passage to India

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Medicine in Literature 1: Illness Narratives through History

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Katherine Inglis

This course examines the history of medicine and its influence on literature through the ages. It focuses the relationship between this development and other discourses of embodiment, the emergence of various illness narratives and the relationship between these and various major historical discoveries, developments and events. The course is, however, not merely a historical overview. Taking in a small annual number of medical students, it allows English Literature and Medical students, alike, to view the reading of literature from multiple perspectives, and to examine the ways in which discourses of embodiment and the view of the sick and/or healthy body change according to shifting political, social and cultural contexts. It will appeal to students who have a particular interest in the history of medicine, embodiment discourses and the intersection between medicine, science and literature in general.

Seminar Schedule 1. Introduction: Historicising Medicine in Fiction Extract from Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (1990); extract from Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997) 2. Galenic Medicine, Potency and Madness in Ancient drama Euripides, Herakles (c. 416 BC); Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BC) 3. Plagues, madness and love sickness: Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380); Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid (c. 1480) 4. The Four Humours, Mutilation and Early Modern Drama William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (c. 1588-1593) & Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606-1607); extract from Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) 5. Poetry, Passion, and Consumption Selection of poetry from John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley; Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978) 6. Nursing, the Sick Room and Sacrifice Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (1853); Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sickroom (1844) 7. War Torn Bodies and the Health Institution Selection of poetry from Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. 8. ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK 9. Identities in Sickness Michael Cunningham, The Hours (1998); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925); On Being Ill (1930) 10. Madness and Literature Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963); Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis (2000) 11. Illness as Narrative/Art Jean Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997); extract from Bob Flanagan, Sick (1997)

Some Suggested Secondary Reading Extracts from critical and theoretical debates will be made available via LEARN. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (1990) Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (2003) Frederick F. Cartwright, Disease and History (1972) Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2008)

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Yasmin Gunaratnam and David Oliviere, Narrative and Stories in Healthcare: Illness, Dying, and Bereavement (2009) A. F. Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (1988) Jeffrey Meyers, Disease and the Novel, 1880-1960 (1985) Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (2001) Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (2009) Tory Vandeventer, Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (2011) Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare's England (2003) Gail Kern Paster, Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (2004) Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (2005) Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999) Katharine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (2011) Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (1995) Diana Berry and Campbell Mackenzie (eds.), The Legacy of War: Poetry, Prose, Painting and Physic (1995)

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Modernism and the Market

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION

Course Organiser: TBC

This course explores the complexities of modernist writers’ engagements with the capitalist marketplace. A traditional view of modernist art understands it as antithetical to the brute, mechanical diktats of commodity culture. This course aims to qualify this position by foregrounding the ambivalence that surrounds modernist encounters with the market. Reading works by a selection of major Anglo-American novelists and poets, we will consider the mixture of horror and delight with which modernists surveyed a gleaming new landscape of consumer products and a capitalist economy violently transforming traditional ways of life; we will reflect on the ways in which modernists’ anxieties and desires concerning the commodity status of their own work are internalised in their writing; and we will think through the relationship between modernism’s challenge to meaning and representation and changes in the nature of money and the structure of the global economy in the early twentieth century.

Schedule

WEEK 1 Introduction Paul Delany, ‘Who Paid for Modernism?’ (1999); Jean-Joseph Goux, from The Coiners of Language (1994 [1984]) (both available via LEARN) WEEK 2 E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910; Penguin Classics, 2008) WEEK 3 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914; Dover, 1997) and five short reflections on money (1936; available via LEARN) WEEK 4 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (1918/1928; Oxford World’s Classics, 2010) WEEK 5 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; Oxford World’s Classics, 2008) WEEK 6 John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925; Penguin Modern Classics, 2006) WEEK 7 Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928; Serpent’s Tail, 2001) WEEK 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK WEEK 9 Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934; Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) WEEK 10 Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939; Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) WEEK 11 Ezra Pound, selections from The Cantos (1929-1965; New Directions, 1996); Richard Sieburth, ‘In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The Poetry of Economics’ (1987; available via LEARN)

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

-understand how a selection of major Anglo-American modernist novelists and poets engaged with economic issues -draw on relevant theoretical approaches (including Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, and the ‘new economic criticism’) in order to analyse the relationships between economic pressures and the forms and contents of modernist writing -reflect on the shared status of literary language and money as symbolic systems

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Indicative Secondary Texts

Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Brown, Judith Christine. Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Comentale, Edward P. Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cooper, John Xiros. Modernism and the Culture of Market Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dettmar, Kevin J.H. and Stephen Watt, eds. Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Karl, Alissa G. Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York: Routledge, 2008. Moglen, Seth. Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Osteen, Mark and Martha Woodmansee, eds. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge, 1999. Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Rosenquist, Rod. Modernism, the Market, and the Institution of the New. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Turner, Catherine. Marketing Modernism Between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Willison, Ian, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds. Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. London: Macmillan, 1996. Glenn Willmott. Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

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Working Class Representations *

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Aaron Kelly

This course examines how working-class writers have represented themselves as well as how they have been represented by others. It pays due attention to the formal modes employed by working-class writing (realism, expressionism, surrealism, fantasy etc) across a range of genres – fiction, poetry, drama and film. The course moves from the nineteenth century to the present in order to understand how class identities change over time yet it also affirms how the reconstitution of class is not synonymous with its disappearance. The course will focus on key issues such as the relationship between culture and politics, the intellectual or writer as a socially mediated figure, solidarity and individuality, social mobility, gender, voice and vernacular, the politics of representation.

Seminar Schedule and Primary Texts

Week 1 Introduction; Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘Tom’s Garland: Upon the Unemployed’ (poem handout provided) Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (Oxford Worlds Classics 2006) Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End.(Birlinn 2000). Week 2 Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Penguin 2004) Week 3 James Hanley, Boy Week 4 Alan Silitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey (Heinemann 1992) Week 5 Up the Junction (film); Kes (film) Week 6 Tony Harrison, Selected Poems (Penguin 2006) Tom Leonard, Intimate Voices (Vintage 1995) Week 7 James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late (Vintage 1995) Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 9 Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting; Trainspotting (Film version) Week 10 Films: Dockers; Riff-Raff Week 11 Films: Brassed Off; Billy Elliott;

Suggested Further Reading

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Chatto and Windus 1973); Culture and Society (Penguin 1962); The Long Revolution (Penguin 1965); Keywords (Flamingo 1983); Marxism and Literature (Oxford UP 1977) Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Merlin 1971); The Historical Novel (Merlin 1989); The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin 1962) Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction (Northcote 1997) Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Routledge 1992) Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (Verso 1978); The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell 1990); Marxist Literary Theory (Blackwell 1996) Cary Grossburg and Lawrence Nelson, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Macmillan 1988) Philip Gillet, The British Working Class in Postwar Film (Manchester 1997) Aaron Kelly, Irvine Welsh (Manchester 2005)

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Writing for Theatre: An Introduction *

English Literature Third and Fourth Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Nicola McCartney

Course Schedule: WEEK 1: Introduction. Theatre in Four Dimensions – workshop/ seminar

WEEK 2: Character and Action. “Ramallah” by David Greig, “Snuff” by Davey Anderson,

WEEK 3: From page to stage: using the sign systems of theatre – “Theatre as Sign-System” by Astona and Savona

WEEK 4: Virtual World: space and time. “Distracted” by Morna Pearson, “The Price of a Fish Supper” by Catherine Czerkawska

WEEK 5: Dialogue. “Harm” by Douglas Maxwell, “The Basement Flat” by Rona Munro

WEEK 6: Plot and Structure. “Better Days, Better Knights” by Stanley Eveling, “The Importance of Being Alfred” by Louise Welsh

WEEK 7: WORKSHOP – 3 plays

WEEK 8: ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

WEEK 9: WORKSHOP – 3 plays

WEEK 10: WORKSHOP – 3 plays

WEEK 11: WORKSHOP – 3 plays

This is a course on short play writing. All plays discussed come from Scottish Shorts, a collection of nine short plays by three generations of Scottish playwrights.

Texts & Performances: Scottish Shorts, selected and introduced by Philip Howard, Nick Hern Books (5 Aug 2010) Aston, Elaine & Savona, George. Theatre as Sign-System: a Semiotics of Text and Performance, Routledge, (Nov 1991)

NB: As students will be required to write a critical essay on a live production, they will be required to see that production preferably twice before writing about it. A list of productions which can be written about will be distributed at the start of term. Additional reading will be given for certain seminars.

Additional Reading: Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Routledge (June 2002) Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works , various editions Sophocles, Oedipus, various editions

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Carter, David. How to Write a Play (Teach Yourself Educational), Teach Yourself Books 1998 Edgar, David. How Plays Work: A Practical Guide to Playwriting, Nick Hern Books (June 2009)

Autonomous Learning Groups: In this course, ALGs will be devoted to writing exercises. Each week, the tutor will assign a different writing exercise to be completed during the first ½ hour of each ALG session. Everyone will stop writing after ½ hour and devote the remaining time to sharing your work by reading it aloud and then discussing it in the remaining ½ hour of the session. We will then engage in a brief discussion about these sessions when we meet in class each week.

Workshop: The second half of the term will be devoted to reading aloud and giving feedback (both written and oral) to your classmates, along with writing and revising your own short play. Each student will have ONE short play (running time, 20-30 minutes) distributed to the class, read aloud and discussed in each workshop. Students must distribute their plays electronically by 5pm on Friday the week BEFORE they are slated to be discussed in class. This will give the tutor and your fellow students the time they need to give a careful, considerate reading to your work and to write appropriate comments. Any plays received after this deadline will not be read, and the student in question will then forfeit his or her workshop slot.

Upon receiving your peers’ plays electronically, students must print a hard copy of each one and read it with pen or pencil in hand, giving constructive feedback and advice in the margins where appropriate. These hard copies must then be brought to class, as they will be referred to throughout our discussion of the work. At the conclusion of each workshop, all hard copies are then returned to the writer, so that she/he may have the benefit of everyone’s feedback when undertaking revisions.

Assessment: A 2,500 word critical essay in response to a production of a recently staged play in Edinburgh (or Glasgow). Students will be directed to which plays to see at the start of the term and essay questions relating to these set forth to the class in week 3 will form 25% of the final mark. A short play of 20-30 minutes running time that has been drafted, critiqued, and revised will form 75% of the final mark.

This is a class on short play writing. As such, this final work must be a single short play– with a beginning, a middle, and an end––not a collection of scenes nor an excerpt from a full length play.

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IDEOLOGY AND LITERATURE

ENGLISH LITERATURE THIRD YEAR HONOURS

First Semester – Option Course

NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION

COURSE ORGANISER: DR TIM MILNES

This course will examine a number of texts primarily, but not exclusively, from the perspective of changing conceptions of ideology from Marx to the present day. Marx and Althusser will form the principal theoretical perspectives, but secondary reading will include the work of Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Jerome McGann, Terry Eagleton and Frederick Jameson.

N = Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edition, vol. 2 O = Material provided by course organiser

Primary Reading

Week

1. Introducing Ideology: Karl Marx, The German Ideology and other writings (O)

2. The Historical Novel I: Walter Scott, Heart of Midlothian (Penguin)

3. The Historical Novel II: George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical (Penguin)

4. The Romantic Ideology I: William Wordsworth, selected poems (N)

5. The Romantic Ideology II: Charlotte Bronte, The Professor (Penguin)

6. Structuralism: Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (O)

7. Ideology and Modernism I: Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics)

8. ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

9. Ideology and Modernism II: Samuel Beckett, Endgame (N)

10. Ideology and Postmodernism: Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Routledge)

11. Ideology and Historicism (Romanticism Revisited): Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘England in 1819’ and James Chandler, England in 1819 (O)

Other Key Texts

Theodor Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ (1961)

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Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976)

------, ed., Ideology (Longman Critical Readers, 1994)

------, Myths of power: a Marxist study of the Brontës (1975)

Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne, eds., Marxist Literary Theory (Blackwell, 1996)

György Lukács, The Historical Novel (1962)

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977)

Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983)

20 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

Modernism and Empire

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Michelle Keown

This course explores the relationship between European imperialism and literary modernism, focusing primarily on British colonial contexts and legacies (in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific), but also engaging with other European empires (such as the French Caribbean and the Belgian Congo). We will analyse a range of texts published from the 1890s through to 1960, exploring the centrality of empire to various phases of literary modernism. Both late colonialism and modernism share many of the same structuring discourses, such as concerns over the decline and decay of ‘Western’ civilization, and a preoccupation with finding new ways of defining human subjectivity and alterity (in the wake of the collapse of enlightenment humanism, and the rise of psychoanalytical and social Darwinist paradigms). We will explore the relationship between anxieties about the imperialist project, and certain stylistic and thematic innovations in modernist literature, including: (i) the preoccupation with Western degeneration (which is interpreted by some modernist writers as a consequence of inter-racial contact and miscegenation, while others hold that Western culture can be revitalised by outside cultural and artistic influences); (ii) a preoccupation with multiple subjectivities and limited/unreliable narrators; (iii) experiments with symbolism and imagism as alternatives to Victorian realism and positivism. We will question the degree to which modernism was complicit with, or opposed to, imperialism, exploring texts produced by British authors (such as George Orwell, Leonard Woolf and Joyce Cary) who participated in the administration of British imperial territories, as well as the work of writers more peripheral to the workings of empire (such as Joseph Conrad, and women writers such as Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield). We will also consider how modernism was taken up by writers (such as Mulk Raj Anand and Aimé Césaire) situated at the colonial ‘margins’, investigating cross-cultural friendships and alliances (such as those between E.M. Forster and Anand, and Ezra Pound and Rabindranath Tagore), as well as counter-discursive interventions by postcolonial writers such as Chinua Achebe, whose novel No Longer at Ease (1960) serves as a riposte to Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939).

Seminar schedule

Week 1: Course introduction; Joseph Conrad, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1897); Rudyard Kipling, ‘Regulus’ (1917) Week 2: Miscegenation and degeneration: Rudyard Kipling, ‘Kidnapped’ (1888); Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Ebb Tide’; Jack London, ‘Goodbye Jack’ (1909); W. Somerset Maugham, ‘Rain’ (1921) Week 3: Ezra Pound and ‘The East’: Pound’s ideogrammatic poetry and the Chinese Cantos; Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali translations (1912) Week 4: E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924) Week 5: Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935) Week 6: Leonard Woolf, ‘Pearls and Swine’ (1921) and selected letters; George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936) Week 7: Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1937); selected stories by Katherine Mansfield Week 8: ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 9: Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939; using the Bloodaxe translation, Notebook of a Return to my Native Land (1995)) Week 10: Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson (1939) and ‘Umaru’ (1921) Week 11: Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (1960)

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Reading List

Primary texts (compulsory purchase):

Achebe, Chinua, No Longer at Ease (Penguin, 2010, ISBN 0141191554) Anand, Mulk Raj. Untouchable (Penguin, 1989, 0140183957) Cary, Joyce, Mister Johnson (Faber and Faber, 2009, 0571252095) Césaire, Aimé, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (Bloodaxe, 1995, 1852241845). Forster, E.M. A Passage to India (Penguin, 1998, 0140274235) Mansfield, Katherine, Selected Stories (ed. Angela Smith). Oxford University Press, 2008, 9780199537358. Pound, Ezra, Selected Poems and Translations (Faber and Faber, 2011, 0571239005) Rhys, Jean, Voyage in the Dark (Penguin, 2000, 0141183950) Stevenson, Robert Louis. Tales of the South Seas (Oxford University Press, ed. Roslyn Jolly) Tagore, Rabindranath. Gitanjali (Full Circle, 2004, 8176211125) Woolf, Leonard. Stories of the East. (Long Riders’ Guild Press, 2007, 1590482530) [Other material, including short stories and poems, will be available on Learn]

Selected Secondary Reading

Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford University Press, 2005) Booth, Howard and Rigby, Nigel (eds), Modernism and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2000). Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFlarne (eds) Modernism 1890-1930 Sussex: Harvester, 1978. Childs, Peter. Modernism and the Post-Colonial: Literature and Empire 1885-1930 (London: Continuum, 2007). Davis, Alex and Lee M. Jenkins, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Seamus Deane, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said (eds), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 43- 68. Kolocotroni, Vasiliki, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh University Press, 1998). Levenson, Michael (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Lukács, Georg, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’. Marxist Literary Theory, ed Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 141-62. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1994). Schiach, Morag (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction: an Introduction (Longman, 1997). Walder, Dennis (ed), Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003).

22 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

Gender and Theatrical Representation

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Olga Taxidou

This course sets out to examine the complex relationships between gender and representation, as these have been specifically manifested in the history of the theatre. It follows two strands: one historical and the other more theoretical. These are parallel and complimentary

Specific instances of the role of gender in theatrical modes of production will be studied in the examples of Classical Greek Drama and Elizabethan Drama. The absence of women from these stages will be read both in respect to specific historical contexts and to the type of conventions of representation this absence helped shape. This historical investigation will continue with the study of the rise of the English actress, leading to a critical account of contemporary feminist theatres.

Another central concern of this course will be the structural link between gender construction and performativity as this has been expressed by the recent psychoanalytical and gender-based theory. In this context recent developments in Queer Theory will be discussed with examples from Camp and Drag performance.

Seminar Schedule

Week 1 Gender: Performativity and Performance Week 2 Classical Greek Theatre I: The Oresteia Week 3 Classical Greek Theatre II: Antigone ,Medea, The Bacchae Week 4 Shakespeare I : Comedies, As You Like It, Twelfth Night Week 5 Shakespeare II: Measure for Measure Week 6 Shakespeare III: Hamlet Week 7 The Rise of the English Actress Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 9 Contemporary Feminist Theatres: Caryl Churchill - Liz Lochhead Week 10 Feminist Performance Art Week 11 The Aesthetics and Politics of Camp: Tony Kushner

General Reading List:

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (1992) Bodies that Matter, (1994) Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700, (1992) Lizbeth Goodman, Contemporary Feminist Theatres, (1991) Andrew Parker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, (eds), Performance and Performativity, (1995) Moe Meyer (ed), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (1994) Carol Martin (ed), A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance (1996)

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Play-texts:

Aeschylus, The Oresteia Sophocles, Antigone Euripides, Medea, The Bacchae Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; As You Like It; Measure for Measure; Hamlet Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine Liz Lochhead, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off Tony Kuchner, Angels in America I and II

24 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

The Making of Modern Fantasy

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Anna Vaninskaya

How does a genre come into being? In this course we will trace the making of the modern fantasy genre by reading the works – both creative and theoretical – of its founding fathers and mothers. Fantasy in its widest definition goes back to the beginnings of human literature, and in its narrowest is a publishing category just several decades old. We will adopt the medium-range view and examine texts that are identifiably ‘fantastic’ in the modern sense, and that are linked together in an attested genealogical chain, but that were mostly written before fantasy emerged as a best-selling type of ‘genre fiction’ and before it assumed the place in popular culture that it occupies today. We will consider fantasy’s relation to cognate genres (fairy tale, epic, saga, romance, gothic, science fiction) and sub-genres (children’s fantasy, Arthurian or Classical fantasy), and to the literary context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (romanticism, realism, modernism). Many of the authors in this course were professionally engaged in the study of medieval and early modern literature, folklore, anthropology, philology, and mythology; and these disciplines contributed significantly to the formation of the genre, especially the past-orientation of certain (though not all) texts, evident in everything from setting to linguistic archaism. We will look at such hallmarks of style and other characteristics of secondary world-building; as well as at fantasy’s engagement with issues of class, gender, race, and religion; and common themes and structures, such as the obsession with death and time, the role of boundaries and other-worlds, and the use of the quest or journey motif.

Seminar Schedule

1. Introduction: Ursula Le Guin’s essay ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’

The Roots of the Genre

2. William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain, or The Land of Living Men (1891)

3. George MacDonald, Lilith (1895) and his essays ‘The Imagination: Its Function and Culture’ and ‘The Fantastic Imagination’

Fantasy in the Age of Modernism

4. E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

5. Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) and his story ‘In the Land of Time’

6. Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)

Into the Mainstream

7. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943) and his essay ‘On Stories’

8. ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

9. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) and his essay ‘On Fairy-stories’

25 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

10. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Coda

11. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1973)

Indicative Secondary Bibliography

Armitt, Lucie, Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction (2005) ---, Theorising the Fantastic (1996) Attebery, Brian, Strategies of Fantasy (1992) ---, Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2014) Brooke-Rose, Christine, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981) Carter, Lin, Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy (1973) Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy (1997) Gray, William, Death and Fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald and R.L. Stevenson (2009) ---, Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald, and Hoffman (2009) Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (1978) Cornwell, Neil, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (1990) Filmer, Kath, ed., Twentieth-century Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in Twentieth-century Mythopoeic Literature (1992) ---, The Victorian Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in the Mythopoeic Fiction of the Victorian Age (1991) Hassler, Donald M. and Carl B. Yoke, eds., Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1985) Hunt, Peter and Millicent Lenz, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (2001) Hunter, Lynette, Modern Allegory and Fantasy: Rhetorical Stances of Contemporary Writing (1989) Irwin, William R., The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (1976) Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) Magill, Frank N. ed., Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, 5 vols. (1983) Manlove, Colin, Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present (1992) ---, The Fantasy Literature of England (1999) ---, The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (1982) ---, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975) ---, Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey (1994) Mathews, Richard, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (2002) Mendlesohn, Farah, Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) Mendlesohn, Farah and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (2009/2012) ---, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (2012) Michalson, Karen, Victorian Fantasy Literature: Literary Battles with Church and Empire (1990) Moorcock, Michael, Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (1987/2004) Prickett, Stephen, Victorian Fantasy (1979/2005) Rabkin, Eric, The Fantastic in Literature (1976) Saler, Michael, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (2012) Sandner, David, ed. Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (2004) Schlobin, Roger C., ed. The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art (1982) Schweitzer, Darrell, ed., Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature (1996) Sprague de Camp, L., Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: the Makers of Heroic Fantasy (1976) Stableford, Brian, Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (2005) Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975) Wolf, Mark J. P., Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012) Wolfe, Gary K., Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (2011) Young, Joseph Rex, Secondary Worlds in Pre-Tolkienian Fantasy Fiction (2010)

26 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

Modern Scottish Fiction *

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Alex Thomson

This course examines selected works of fiction by Scottish writers from the 1930s to the early 1980s. It covers a period in Scottish literary history stretching from the Renaissance of the 1920s, focused around the figures of MacDiarmid and Gibbon, to the development of a distinctively contemporary Scottish literature in the 1980s, examining a set of concerns which can be seen to culminate in the work of Alasdair Gray. The focus is on ‘literary’ rather than genre fiction, and the course seeks to explore a range of the various formal strategies available to writers of the period. In particular the course will examine the interaction between the demand for artistic ‘realism’ in the name of political expediency and longer standing artistic commitments to mythic and romance modes of storytelling, the tension between which might be said to characterise wider debates about the national identity and the political efficacy of writing in the period. The course will also register the significant emergence of a third fictional mode, drawing on existentialist thought and developments in European literature, and paying particular attention to the work of Muriel Spark.

By the end of the course students should expect to have read a range of fiction produced by Scottish writers of this period, and to be able to situate specific works in relation to wider literary and cultural trends. They should be able to discuss the relationship between literature and cultural politics, with particular concern for possible tensions between notions of ‘realism’, ‘myth’ and ‘history’. They should be able to illustrate such a discussion with reference to examples of specific formal strategies adopted by novelists for negotiating between a range of artistic and political demands.

Provisional Seminar Schedule

1. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair. 2. George Blake, The Shipbuilders. 3. Neil Gunn, The Silver Darlings. 4. Jessie Kesson, The White Bird Passes; Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 5. Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat. 6. INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK 7. Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book. 8. Iain Crichton Smith, Consider the Lilies. 9. ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK 10. George Mackay Brown, Greenvoe. 11. William McIlvanney, Docherty. 12. Alasdair Gray, Lanark.

Indicative Secondary Reading

Anderson, Carol and Christianson, Aileen. Scottish Women’s Fiction, 1920 to 1960s: Journeys Into Being. East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000. Bell, Eleanor. Questioning Scotland: Literature, Nationalism, Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004. Bold, Alan. Modern Scottish Literature. London: Longman, 1983. Burgess, Moira. Imagine A City: Glasgow In Fiction. Glendaruel: Argyll, 1998.

27 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

Christianson, Aileen and Lumsden, Alison. Contemporary Scottish Women Writers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Craig, Cairns. Out of History. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996. —— The Modern Scottish Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. —— ed. The History of Scottish Literature Volume 4: The Twentieth Century, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987. Crawford, Robert. Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007. Gifford, Douglas, et. al. Scottish Literature Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Hagemann, Susanne, ed. Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the present. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996. Hart, Francis. The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey. London: John Murray, 1979. March, Cristie L. Rewriting Scotland : Welsh, McLean, Warner, Banks, Galloway and Kennedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. McCulloch, Margery. Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. McIlvanney, Liam. ‘The Politics of Narrative in the post-war Scottish novel.’ On Modern British Fiction. Leader, Zachary, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002: 181-208. Murray, Isobel and Tait, Bob. Ten Modern Scottish Novels. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984. Neubauer, Jurgen. Literature as Intervention: Struggles over Cultural Identity in Contemporary Scottish Fiction. Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999. Schoene, Berthold. ed. Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Schwend, Joachim and Drescher, Horst, eds. Studies in Scottish Fiction: Twentieth Century. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990. Walker, Marshall. Scottish Literature since 1707. Harlow: Longman, 1996. Wallace, Gavin and Stevenson, Randall, eds. The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.

28 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

BRECHT AND BRITISH THEATRE English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION

Course Organiser: Professor Randall Stevenson (*Need to insert Weekly Seminar Schedule) The course will begin by examining Brecht's theories and practice in the theatre and will go on to trace his possible subsequent influence, theoretic and stylistic, on the British stage in the last decades of the twentieth century, assessing what forms and tactics contribute most to 'political theatre' and discussing various forms of political theatre and their effectiveness. Texts to be discussed will include:

Brecht Mother Courage and her Children

The Life of Galileo

The Caucasian Chalk Chalk Circle

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Herr Puntila and his Man Mutti

The Good Woman of Szechuan

John Osborne, The Entertainer

John Arden, Sergeant Musgrave's Dance

Edward Bond, Lear

David Edgar, Maydays

Howard Brenton, The Romans in Britain

John McGrath, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil

Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine

Background and Critical

Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1929) Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues (1977) John Willett, ed., Brecht on Theatre (1957) John McGrath, A Good Night Out (1981) Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama : 1890 - 1990 (1992) and other texts to be specified during the course.

29 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

VICTORIAN WOMEN WRITING *

English Literature Third Year First-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Elsa Bouet

This course, using fiction and nonfiction texts, will consider themes of gender, class and empire (including Scotland and England in relation to each other), as well as looking at questions of social position, the position of women in Victorian society in Victorian women's writing and the intersections between fiction and non-fiction. It considers women as literary critics: articles eg. Geraldine Jewsbury, Mulock Craik, Oliphant; women as fiction writers, Charlotte Bronte, Eliot, Gaskell, Jewsbury, Mulock Craik, Oliphant; the woman question or women's issues: Besant, Martineau, Nightingale, Norton, Oliphant. It will consider women's writing unpublished at the time, eg. letters: Helen Mackenzie, Jane Welsh Carlyle, and autobiography (published and unpublished): Annie Besant, Ellen Johnston, Margaret Oliphant, Christian Watt.

Primary texts

 Primary texts will be considered in the order listed.

Please read over the summer vacation at least Jane Eyre (for discussion in Week 1), Olive (for Week 7) and North and South (for Week 8), leaving plenty of time in term for the non-fiction texts which are an integral part of the course reading.

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847) (Penguin Classics)

Geraldine Jewsbury, The Half Sisters (1848) (World’s Classics)

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855) (Everyman)

Dinah Craik, Olive (1850) (Oxford World’s Classics)

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860) (World's Classics)

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SEMESTER TWO

Page

 American Gothic 32  Creative Writing: Prose * 35  Medicine and Literature 2: Medical Ethics in Literature 37  Shakespeare’s Comedies: Identity & Illusion 40  Shakespeare Modes and Genres 42  We are [not] amused [Not running 2014/15] 44  Celtic Revivals* 46  Mystery & Horror* 48  Gothic* 50  Edinburgh in Fiction/Fiction in Edinburgh [Visiting Students course] 52  American Innocence 55  Naturalist Fiction NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION 57  Reading Theory 58  Postcolonial Writing 60  Poetry & Northern Ireland NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION 63

* Courses with an asterisk have a Scottish emphasis.

31 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

American Gothic

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Keith Hughes

This course will look at Gothic Fiction in America from the late 18th-century to the late 20th-century. Attention will be paid to the ways in which American writers deployed and adapted various Gothic stylistic devices to represent key aspects of the American experience. Of particular interest will be the approach the writers on the course took to socio-cultural issues such as the frontier and wilderness, sex and sexuality, slavery and racial differentiation, regional differentiation, urban sprawl. We will also look at psychological concerns such as the representation of Self and Other (at times Self-as-Other), the paranormal, and subjective experience.

SEMINAR SCHEDULE

Week 1: Introduction: Transatlantic Gothic and the break from Romance

Week 2: A Beginning: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799)

Week 3: Corruption in America: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and selected stories

Week 4: Horror and Abjection: Edgar Allan Poe & H.P. Lovecraft, selected stories

Week 5: Slavery and Racial Terror: Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and other Conjure Tales (1899)

Week 6: INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK

Week 7: Ghostly Selves: Henry James, “The Ghostly Rental” (1876), and “The Jolly Corner” (1908); Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892

Week 8: The Gothic and the Grotesque: Sherwood Anderson Winesburg, Ohio (1919) & Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 10: Southern Blood: William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (1930); Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)

Week 11: Popular Terror: Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959); Stephen King, Night Shift (1978)

Week 12: ‘A patchwork of conceits’ – Gothic and Surfaces: William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985)

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PRIMARY TEXTS

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799) Nathaniel Hawthorne The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and selected stories Edgar Allan Poe, selected stories H.P. Lovecraft, selected stories Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and other Conjure Tales (1899) Henry James, “The Ghostly Rental” (1876), and “The Jolly Corner” (1908) Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919) Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (1930) Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952) Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) Stephen King, Night Shift (1978) William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985)

KEY SECONDARY TEXTS

Linda Badley. Writing Horror and the Body: the Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. Westport Conn,; London: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Brian Docherty, ed. American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

Justin D. Edwards. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003.

Markman Ellis. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: EUP, 2000.

Leslie A. Fiedler. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books, 1960.

Teresa A. Goddu. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Louise Hutchings Westling. Sacred Groves and ravaged Gardens: the Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Peter Kafer. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Christopher J. Knight. Hints and Guesses: Wiliam Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

Harry Levin. The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville. London: Faber & Faber, 1958.

Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, eds. American Gothic: New Inventions in a National Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998

Marilyn Michaud. Republicanism and the American Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.

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Bernice M. Murphy. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. London: palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

David Punter. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the present day. 2 volumes. London: Longman, 1996.

Allan Lloyd Smith. American Gothic Fiction. London: Continuum, 2005. ------Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa’s Face. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.

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Creative Writing: Prose

English Literature Third and Fourth Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: To be confirmed

Overview

In this course, students will explore the structures, techniques, and methodologies of fiction writing through both analytical and creative practice. Focusing specifically on the art and craft of the short story, students will examine a wide range of stories, learning to analyse works from a writer’s perspective. Discussions will emphasize unpacking the functional elements of selected works (character, setting, point-of-view, narrative voice, dialogue, scene versus narrative, plot, and so on) with the aim of learning strategies for evaluating, writing, and revising their own short stories. Weekly creative exercises and workshop sessions will complement and enhance these discussions. Students will also draft, edit and revise their own short stories, while also critiquing and offering constructive feedback on the work of their peers.

Approach

Students will spend the first half of the course analyzing published stories and exploring these techniques and practices through weekly creative exercises in which they will be expected to put these techniques and strategies into practice. The second half of the course will be devoted to workshop sessions in which students read, analyze, and critique short stories drafted by their peers, bringing the strategies and analytic vocabulary developed in the opening half of the course to bear on one another’s short stories, while also using them to guide their own creative process as they draft and revise their own short fiction.

Weekly Schedule: WEEK 1: Introduction. Details that Work: George Saunders’s ‘Sticks’. Reading as a Writer. Ron Carlson’s ‘Down the Green River.’ WEEK 2: Character and Setting. Ian McEwan’s ‘First Love, Last Rites’; V. S. Pritchett’s‘The Saint’; Octavio Paz’s ‘My Life with the Wave’ (hand-out); T. C. Boyle’s ‘Greasy Lake.’ WEEK 3: Point-of-View and Narrative Voice. Margaret Atwood’s ‘Hair Jewelry’; David Foster Wallace’s ‘Girl with Curious Hair’ (hand-out); Eudora Welty’s ‘No Place for You, My Love’; Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Artificial Nigger’. WEEK 4: Scene versus Narrative. Dialogue and Stage Business. Ernest Hemmingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’; Robert Stone’s ‘Helping’ (hand-out); Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Spring in Fialta’; Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Aleph’. WEEK 5: Plot. Yukio Mishima’s ‘Patriotism’; Italo Calvino’s ‘The Distance of the Moon’ (hand-out); and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. WEEK 6: INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK WEEK 7: WORKSHOP—3 stories WEEK 8: WORKSHOP––3 stories WEEK 9: ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK WEEK 10: WORKSHOP—3 stories WEEK 11: WORKSHOP—3 stories WEEK 12: WORKSHOP—3 stories

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The above-listed readings are all drawn from The Art of the Tale, unless otherwise indicated. Supplementary readings will also be assigned as appropriate.

Texts: Halpern, Daniel (ed.). The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories. New York: Penguin, 1986. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Additional Reading:

Bernays, Anne and Pamela Painter. What If? New York: Harper Collins, 1995. Bickman, Jack. Scene and Structure, Writer’s Digest Books, 1999. Chamberlain, Daniel. Narrative Perspective in Fiction. Toronto UP, 1990. Dipple, Elizabeth. Plot. London: Methuen, 1970. Dunn, Douglas, Ed. The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Ehrlich, Susan. Point of View: a linguistic analysis of literary style. London: Routledge, 1990. Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft. London: Vintage, 2001. Garnder, John. On Becoming a Novelist. London: Norton, 2000. Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Cornell UP, 1992. Morrison, Toni. ‘The Site of Memory.’ in What Moves at the Margin. Carolyn C . Denard, Ed. Mississippi UP, 2008. Prose, Francine. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them. London: HarperPerennial, 2007. Sellers, Susan. Delighting the Heart. London: Women’s Press, 1989. Snaider, Susan. The Narrative Act: point of view in prose fiction. Princeton UP, 1981. Stevick, Phillip, ed. The Theory of the Novel. New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1967. Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner, 1929.

Assessment:

A 2,500 word craft analysis essay will form 25% of the final mark. A portfolio consisting of 1) three writing exercises that have been typed up and revised; 2) a 750 word cover letter discussing your revision process in detail; and 3) a 3,000 to 4,000 word short story that has been drafted, critiqued in workshop, and revised will form 75% of the final mark.

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Medicine in Literature 2: Medical Ethics in Literature English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Katherine Inglis.

Aims and Objectives

This course examines the representation of medical ethics in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It particularly focuses on the relationship between this development and other theoretical discourses of embodiment, the ethical dilemmas encountered by doctors and medical professionals and the representation of illness and abnormality in literature, through the lens of various theories of healing and care and posthumanist ethics. It is not merely an exercise in mapping various ethical debates. Taking in a small annual number of medical students, it allows English Literature and Medical students, alike, to view the reading of literature from multiple perspectives, and to examine the ways in which discourses of embodiment and ethical positions change according to shifting political, social and cultural contexts. It will appeal to students who have a particular interest in discourses of embodiment and ethics and the intersection between medicine, science and literature in general.

Seminar Schedule

1. Course introduction: Thinking through the experience of illness Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915); extracts from Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller (1997), Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine (2006), British Medical Association Ethics Department, Medical Ethics Today (2004).

2. The Role of the Doctor Albert Camus, The Plague (1947).

3. The Ethics of Care Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962); extract from Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964).

4. Patient Politics Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1967).

5. Surgical Conditioning Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (1977); extracts from Helene Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990), Monique Wittig, ‘One Is Not Born a Woman’ (1992).

6. INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK

7. The Moral Machine Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (1992).

8. Law and Ethics Edna O’Brien, Down by the River (1996).

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9. ESSAY WRITING WEEK

10. Gendered Bodies Jackie Kay, Trumpet (1998); Extract from Judith Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place (2004).

11. Modification Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003); Julian Savulescu, ‘Genetic Interventions and the Ethics of Enhancement of Human Beings’ (2007).

12. Cloning Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let me Go (2005).

Some Suggested Secondary Reading

Neil Badmington (ed), Posthumanism (2000)

Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions (2006)

Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (2003)

Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006)

Mary K. Deshazer, Fractured Borders: Reading Women's Cancer Literature (2005)

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963) Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964)

Arthur Frank, At the Will of the Body (1991)

Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1997)

Yasmin Gunaratnam and David Oliviere, Narrative and Stories in Health Care: Illness, Dying, and Bereavement (2009)

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999)

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) Robert Kastenbaum, The Psychology of Death (1992)

A. F. Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (1988) James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna (eds), The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines (1991)

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Bonnie Steinbock, The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics (2007)

Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (2009)

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Shakespeare’s Comedies: Identity and Illusion

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Sarah Carpenter

This course explores the range of Shakespeare’s writing of comedy from the early romantic comedies, through the ‘mature’ and ‘problem’ comedies, to the tragicomic romances of the last plays. The course will consider early modern and recent ideas about comedy as a genre and mode, and trace the ongoing engagement of the plays with various interpenetrating thematic debates. An early interest in illusion leads to a focus on the shifting and unstable nature of perception, linked on the one hand to the effects of love and desire, and on the other to notions of the theatrical. These interests lead to a comic and comedic exploration of the nature and growth of the self, the problems of desire and of gendered identity, and the ways in which these may be addressed through the artifice of the comic form.

Indicative Seminar Schedule:

Week 1: Introduction: ideas of comedy

Week 2: Metamorphosis and disguise: Two Gentlemen of Verona

Week 3: Gender and language: Love’s Labours Lost

Week 4: Illusion and Identity: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Week 5: Mask and Mistake: Much Ado About Nothing

Week 6: INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK

Week 7: Green world: As You Like It

Week 8: Desire and Frustration: All’s Well that Ends Well

Week 9: ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 10: Sexuality and problem: Measure for Measure

Week 11: Art and nature: The Winter’s Tale

Week 12: Last Play: The Tempest

Course texts

The cheapest and most convenient way to access all the course texts is a Complete Shakespeare (which is well worth everyone owning, for now and the future). The recent RSC Complete Works is one very good choice. But this is not a very easy or pleasurable way to read individual plays. It would be much better to use one of the many individual paperback series. The New Cambridge series is excellent, with full notes and introductions, but there are many other good editions.

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Initial further reading:

Barber, C L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959. Dutton, Richard, and Jean E Howard. A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: Vol 3 the Comedies. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. ---. A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: Vol 4 the Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Leggatt, Alexander. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Maslen, R.W. Shakespeare and Comedy. London: Thomson Learning, 2006.

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Shakespeare: Modes & Genres (The roots of Shakespearean Theatre)

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr David Salter

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene indivisible, or poem unlimited.' Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 391 - 4.

Since the appearance of the First Folio in 1623 – with its divisions of the plays into comedies, tragedies, and histories – a discussion of genre has been central to critical debates about Shakespeare, and it remains an influential approach to an understanding of his work. The course will question the usefulness of these generic classifications, and ask to what extent an awareness of the specific conventions of genre can help to explain the structure of a play and the actions of its protagonists. At the same time, the course will examine the fluidity of generic boundaries, and the originality of Shakespeare’s exploitation of them.

Primary Texts

Please feel free to use any scholarly edition of the plays. I rate The Oxford Shakespeare particularly highly, but this is just a personal preference.

Seminar Schedule

Week 1 Introduction: Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream Week 2 Comedy I: The Merchant of Venice Week 3 Comedy II: Twelfth Night Week 4 Comedy III: Measure for Measure Week 5 Tragedy I: Hamlet Week 6 INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK Week 7 Tragedy II: King Lear Week 8 Tragedy III: Anthony and Cleopatra Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 10 History I: Richard II Week 11 History II: Henry IV Parts One & Two Week 12 Romance: The Tempest

Secondary Reading

Further reading will be suggested at the seminars. But in preparation for the course, as well as reading as many of the primary texts as possible, you may find the following critical reading useful.

Alexander Leggatt, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Cambridge, 2002) Claire McEachern, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge, 2003)

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Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York, 1965) _____ The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (Brighton, 1983) C. L. Barker, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, 1959) Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton N.J., 1979) A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1904) Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (London, 1992) E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, revised edition (Harmondsworth, 1969)

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'We Are [not] Amused': Victorian Comic Literature [Not Running 2014/15]

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Jonathan Wild

Although ‘comedy’ and ‘humour’ are not words readily associated with this period, Victorian culture was rife with various manifestations of what George Meredith called ‘comic spirit’. By adopting a largely chronological approach, this course traces the development of the comic genre from the early Victorian comic prose of Dickens and Thackeray, through to Wildeian farce at the fin de siècle. Among the concepts of comedy discussed will be high and low comedy, irony, wordplay, comic songs, satire, black comedy, farce and comedy of manners. Each week, in addition to chosen core material, we will examine a variety of theoretical material relevant to this course. This will include work by writers such as Meredith, Bergson, Freud and Bakhtin, together with more recent critical perspectives on this topic.

By the end of this course, students will gain a detailed historical and theoretical understanding of a key literary genre. This understanding of the forms of comedy in the Victorian period will inform and complement the future study of this genre in other literary periods. The student completing this course will also gain experience of a wide variety of textual forms (novels, short stories, plays, poetry, song lyrics) and will understand how to incorporate these diverse forms into critical debates. In addition, the chronological nature of this course allow the student to trace the ways in which a major literary genre is subject to change over a relatively short period of time.

SEMINAR SCHEDULE

Introduction to Course WEEK 1 Definitions and information about core texts Comedy, Satire and Serialisation Week 2 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers 1 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers 2 and W. M. Thackeray, ‘A Little Dinner at Week 3 Timmins’s’ High Society Comedy Plays Week 4 Dion Boucicault, London Assurance Week 5 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Money Comic Poetry and Song Week 6 INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK Week 7 Nonsense, Puns, and Parodies: Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Thomas Hood, and others Week 8 Musical Comedy: Music Hall and Gilbert and Sullivan Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK The New Humour Week 10 George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody Week 11 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat The Comedy of Manners Week 12 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

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Background Reading

Cordner, Michael. Holland, Peter. and Kerrigan, John (eds.), English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 1994) Corrigan, Robert W, Comedy : Meaning and Form (Harper & Row, 1981) Corrigan, Robert. W (ed.) Comedy : A Critical Anthology (Houghton Mifflin, 1971) Evans, James E. (ed.), Comedy : An Annotated Bibliography of Theory and Criticism (Metuchen, Scarecrow, 1987) Freud, Sigmund, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (Penguin Modern Classics, 2004) Ganz, Margaret. Humor, Irony, and the Realm of Madness: Psychological Studies in Dickens, Butler, and Others (AMS Press, 1990) Henkle, Roger. B, Comedy and Culture : England, 1820-1900 (Princeton University Press, 1980) Hirst, David L, Comedy of Manners (Methuen, 1979) Kift, Dagmar, Kift, Roy, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflcit (Cambridge University Press 1996) Martin, Robert Bernard, The Triumph of Wit : A Study of Victorian Comic Theory (Clarendon Press, 1974) Michelson, Bruce, Literary Wit (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000) Nilsen, Don L, Humor in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: a Reference Guide (Greenwood Press, 1998) Olson, Kirby, Comedy After Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford (Texas University Press, 2001) Palmer, D.J. (ed.), Comedy: Developments in Criticism (Macmillan, 1984) Pearsall, Ronald, Collapse of Stout Party : Victorian Wit and Humour (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975) Pritchett, V. S, George Meredith and English Comedy (Chatto & Windus, 1970) Ross, Alison, The Language of Humour (Routledge, 1998) Storey, Mark, Poetry and Humour from Cowper to Clough (Macmillan, 1979) Stott, Andrew, Comedy: New Critical Idiom Series (Routledge, 2004) Sypher, Wylie (ed.), Comedy (includes Meredith’s ‘An Essay on Comedy’ and Bergson’s ‘Laughter’) (John Hopkins University Press, 1980) Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer. A (ed.), The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives (Ashgate, 2000)

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Celtic Revivals: Writing on the Periphery, 1890-1939*

ENGLISH LITERATURE THIRD YEAR HONOURS

SECOND SEMESTER - OPTION COURSE

COURSE ORGANISER: Dr Alan Gillis

The course will explore the similarities and differences between the national revivals in the literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales and their relationship to modernism. With a predominant focus on Ireland, we will examine the different ways in which "peripheral" literatures seek to establish their identity, exploring the formal innovations adopted by writers from the three cultures.

Week 1 Introduction

Week 2 Celticism, Romanticism, Nationalism and Modernity

Week 3 The Heroic Ideal: W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge

Week 4 Joyce and the Anti-Heroic: Dubliners and A Portrait

Week 5 Nationalism, Colonialism and Cosmopolitanism: Ulysses

Week 6 INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK

Week 7 Gender, Sex and the City: Ulysses

Week 8 The Filthy Modern Tide: Late W. B. Yeats

Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 10 Nationalism and Internationalism: Hugh MacDiarmid

Week 11 Scottish Pastoral: Sunset Song

Week 12 Dylan Thomas

Primary Texts

Joyce, James. Dubliners (1914). Norton Critical Ed. New York: Norton, 2006. _____ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Norton Critical Ed. New York: Norton, 2006. _____ Ulysses (1922). Annotated Students’ Ed. London: Penguin, 2011. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. Sunset Song (1932). New ed. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2006. MacDiarmid, Hugh. Selected Poetry. Manchester: Fyfield Books, 2004. Synge, J. M. The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays. Oxford: OUP, 1998. Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems, 1934-53. London: Phoenix Press, 2000. _____ Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. London: Penguin, 2000. Yeats, W. B. The Major Works. Oxford: OUP, 2001.

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Indicative Secondary Reading:

Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985. Dublin: Fontana, 1985. Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture. Manchester UP, 1988. Craig, Cairns, ed. The History of Scottish Literature, Volume 4: Twentieth Century. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987. Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature; The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Edinburgh: EUP, 2000. Deane, Seamus. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature. London: Faber, 1985. _____ Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Gibbons, Luke. Transformations in Irish Culture. Cork: Cork UP and Field Day, 1996) Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995 Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Dublin: Lilliput, 1993. Longley, Edna, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994. McCulloch, Margery Palmer (ed.). Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939: Source Documents for The Scottish Renaissance. Glasgow: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2004.

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MYSTERY AND HORROR*

ENGLISH LITERATURE THIRD YEAR HONOURS

SECOND SEMESTER - OPTION COURSE

COURSE ORGANISER: Dr Simon Cooke

This course looks at popular fiction in the late 19th and 20th centuries to see how suspense narratives are encoded in society. We will look at detective stories, espionage fiction, ghost stories, horror fiction, and thrillers, to see how ideologies are both reinforced and challenged by popular fiction. The course will consider the emergence and development of the genres, explore the allure of fear, and examine ideas about class and gender in relation to the practices of reading and the circulation of texts. Though primarily focused on literature, the topic invites comparison of literature and film, and will be supplemented by optional film screenings and discussions.

Primary reading:

William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes Stories (the Bedford Books edition is recommended but you can get cheaper editions) Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs M.R. James, Ghost Stories (Penguin or Wordsworth Classics) John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold H.P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (Gollancz) Ian Rankin, Hide and Seek R L Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Bram Stoker, Dracula

Seminar Schedule

Week 1 Introduction

READING MYSTERY: crime, detection and espionage

Week 2 Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes Stories (the 15 selected in the Bedford edition*)

Week 3 Ian Rankin, Hide and Seek

Week 4 John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps

Week 5 John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Week 6 INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK

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READING HORROR: Ghosts, monsters and madmen

Week 7 M.R. James, a selection from Ghost Stories and ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’** H.P. Lovecraft, a selection from Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft and ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’**

Week 8 Bram Stoker, Dracula

Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 10 Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

Week 11 R.L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Week 12 William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

* Included in the Bedford edition are (in addition to an extract from A Study in Scarlet): ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’; ‘The Red-headed League’; ‘A Case of Identity’; ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’; ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’; ‘The Blue Carbuncle’; ‘The Speckled Band’; ‘Silver Blaze’; ‘The Musgrave Ritual’; ‘The Final Problem’; ‘The Empty House’; ‘The Dancing Men’; ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’; ‘The Second Stain’. ** Scans of these essays will be made available on Learn.

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Gothic

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Tom Mole

This course will ask two questions: what is the gothic, and what is the gothic for? The first question is about the topics, preoccupations, forms and styles that characterize the gothic. The second is about the social, political and cultural purposes that the gothic serves. Understanding the gothic thoroughly, this class suggests, means seeking answers to both these questions. Beginning with the emergence of gothic in the mid-eighteenth century, we will trace the cultural history of the gothic in novels, poems and film over the last two hundred years.

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of the course, students will be able to:  Identify and discuss key themes in gothic texts  Debate the question of how gothic should be understood – as a genre, a mode, or a set of thematic preoccupations  Distinguish different traditions of the gothic, for example those associated with Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis  Identify and discuss key gothic devices such as the found manuscript, the explained supernatural and the sexualized use of space.

Schedule

Week 1 Introduction

Week 2 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), ed. by E.J. Clery and W.S. Lewis, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Week 3 Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) (online)

Week 4 Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796), ed. by Emma McEvoy, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Week 5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel (1816) (coursepack)

Week 6 INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK

Week 7 Lord Byron, Darkness (1816) (coursepack)

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Week 8 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), ed. by Martin A. Danahay (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005).

Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 10 Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), ed. by Glennis Byron (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1998).

Week 11 Film: Nosferatu (1922)

Week 12 Conclusions: Gothic Now

Further Reading

Blakemore, Stephen, 'Matthew Lewis's Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion in The Monk' Studies in the Novel, 30 ( 1998), pp. 521-539. Bloom, Clive, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror 1764 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2010). Botting, Fred, The Gothic (Routledge, 1996). Braben, Benjamin A., 'Surveying Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Landscapes' Literature Compass, 3. 4 (2006), 840-845. Brown, Nicola and Burdett, Carolyn and Pamela Thurschwell Eds. The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Clery, E.J., The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Fincher, Max, Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Franklin, Caroline, Ed. The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse (Harlow: Pearson, 2011). Guest, Harriet, 'The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory after 1760' Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts: 1780-1832, ed. by Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 118-139. Hoeveler, Diane Long, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998). Kilgour, Maggie, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1995). Punter, David, A Companion to the Gothic (London: Blackwell, 2001). Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980). Spooner, Catherine and McEvoy, Emma, eds. The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007). Swann, Karen 'Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel' ELH, 2 (1985), 397-418. Wall, James, Contesting the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Wright, Angela, Britain, France and the Gothic 1764-1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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Edinburgh in Fiction/Fiction in Edinburgh * [VISITING STUDENT’S ONLY COURSE]

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: To be confirmed

This course will examine the city in history as represented in fiction in the particular case of Edinburgh, from the historical fiction of Scott, Hogg and Stevenson to the genre fiction of the last two decades. It will examine the construction of the city in these texts as a site of legal, religious, economic and cultural discourse. The extent to which civic identity both contributes to and competes with national identity will be a central theme, as will the internal division of the city along lines of religion, gender, and, especially, class.

Seminar Schedule

Week 1. Introduction; extracts from Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771)

Week 2. Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (1818)

Week 3. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

Week 4. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886); Catriona (1893)

Week 5. Eric Linklater, Magnus Merriman (1935)

Week 6. INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK

Week 7. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

Week 8. David Daiches, Two Worlds (1956); Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae (1992)

Week 9. ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 10. Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993)

Week 11. Iain Banks, Complicity (1993)

Week 12. Ian Rankin, Set in Darkness (2000) and The Falls (2001)

Secondary Reading

Ambrosini, Richard and Richard Dury (eds.) Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Madison WI: Wisconsin University Press, 2006.

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Bold, Alan (ed.). Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. London: Barnes and Noble, 1984.

Craig, Cairns. Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996.

---. The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination. Edinburgh: EUP, 1999.

---. Iain Bank’s Complicity: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2002.

Duncan, Ian. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Hagemann, Susanne (ed.). Studies in Scottish Fiction, 1945 to the Present. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996.

Hynes, Joseph (ed.). Collected Essays on Muriel Spark. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992.

Jones, William B. (ed.) Robert Louis Stevenson Reconsidered: New Critical Perspectives. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2003.

Keen, Catherine and David Midgley (eds.). Imagining the City. 2 vols. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006.

Kim, Julie H. (ed.). Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story: Ten Essays. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2005.

McCraken-Flesher, Caroline. ‘“One City” of Fragments: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Second (Person) City through David Daiches’s Personal Eye.’ David Daiches: A Celebration of his Life and Work. Ed. William Baker and Michael Lister. Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2008.

Morace, Robert. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2001.

Wallace, Gavin and Randall Stevenson (ed.). The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. Edinburgh: EUP, 1993.

Select Secondary Bibliography:

Campbell, N. The cultures of the American New West, 2000 Milner, C.A. (ed) The Oxford History of the American West, 1994 J. Tompkins, West of Everything. R. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 1992. P. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 1987. W. Cronon (ed) Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, 1992. D. Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West, 1992. ------, Rivers of Empire, Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, 1985. R. White, A New History of the American West, 1993. K. Comer, Women Writers, the New West, and the Politics of Landscape, 1999.

53 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

E. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, 1996. M. Kowalewski, Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West, 1996. S. Fender, Plotting The Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail, 1981. J. K. Folsom, The Western American Novel, 1966. R. E. Lee, From West to East: Studies of the Literature of the American West, 1966. J. R. Milton, The Novel of the American West, 1980. W. T. Pilkington (ed), Critical Essays on the Western American Novel, 1980. H. P. Simonson, Writers, Western Regionalism, and a Sense of Place, 1989. G. Day (ed), A Literature of the American West, 1987. D. Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, 1970. D. J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, 1958. E. Heyne, Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier, 1992. J. Seelye, Stories of the Old West, (Penguin anthology), 1985. P. Bohannan and F. Plog (eds) Beyond The Frontier, 1967. J. G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, 1976. J. G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 1971. L. L. Hazard, The Frontier in American Literature, 1961. W. Wright, Six-Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, 1975. J. G. Taylor (ed), The Literature of the American West, 1971. D. Donoghue, Reading America: Essays on American Literature, 1987.

54 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

American Innocence

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Ken Millard

The U.S. is often understood as a young nation, one that defined itself by means of a decisive departure from Old World customs that had grown moribund. The New World’s emergent autonomy is often articulated in the language of a parent–child relationship in which the U. S. is the rebellious teenager, impatient to commit itself to fresh experiences, and eager to create its own character founded on a new set of priorities and values. The figurative language of youth frequently inhabits the national mythology of the U.S., and the concept of innocence, or something designated innocence, has acquired a particular resonance in the context of American studies. Oscar Wilde once wrote that the youth of America is their oldest tradition; for how long can a nation understand itself as beginning again without seeming to acquire significant historical baggage, and what specific ideological practices continue to facilitate a view of the U. S. as young? The aim of this course is to examine the historiographical origins and complexities of this American mythology through the dramatisation of innocence in the American novel. In particular, the genre of the coming-of-age novel (which has become, perhaps, a quintessentially American genre, despite its German origins) will be used as a focus for the scrutiny of innocence and experience. Protagonists in this genre are the American Adam, caught in a moment of prelapsarian naivety, and then expelled forever into the unforgiving world of modern experience. But what specific forms of experience shape American character? Why do adult writers so often appropriate the voice of the disaffected teenager as a vehicle for social critique? What investments in youth does adult culture make, and how might that determine how `innocence’ is permitted to be? How do women writers work successfully in a genre that was originally male, and how has the genre been re-invigorated since the impact of The Catcher in The Rye in 1951? `American Innocence’ is a course that addresses these questions through the close study of ten novels that problematise innocence and dramatise its fall through a variety of different American cultural experiences.

Seminar Schedule

Week 1 Introduction: the history of the genre Week 2 Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885 Week 3 Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 1919 Week 4 Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding, 1946 Week 5 J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951 Week 6 Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, 2001 Week 7 Charles Portis, True Grit, 2005 Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 9 Barry Hannah, High Lonesome, 1997 Week 10 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 2000 Week 11 Josephine Humphreys, Rich in Love, 2000

Secondary Bibliography Abel, E. Hirsch, M. Langland, E. (eds), 1983. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England. Baruch, E. H. 1981. `The Feminine Bildungsroman: Education through Marriage’, Massachusetts Review, 22, 1981, 335-57. Beaver, H. 1987. Huckleberry Finn. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Braendlin, B. H. 1983. `Bildung in Ethnic Women Writers’, Denver Quarterly, 17, 1983, 75-87. Buckley, J. H. 1974. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Campbell, N. (ed). 2000. The Radiant Hour: Versions of Youth in American Culture. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Curnutt, K. 2001. Teenage Wasteland: Coming-of-Age Novels in the 1980s and 1990s. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2001, 43, 1, 93-111. Egan, M. 1977. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn: Race, Class and Society. London: Sussex University Press. Fiedler, L. 1955. An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press. Finnegan. W. 1999. Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country. London: Picador. Fraiman, S. 1993. Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and The Novel of Development. New York: Columbia University Press. Giroux, H. A. 1997. Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Grossberg, L. 1992. We Gotta Get Out of This Place. London: Routledge. Hardin, J. (ed). 1991. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Hassan, I. 1961. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. Jackson, S. M. 1994. `Josephine Humphreys and the Politics of Postmodern Desire’. Mississippi Quarterly, 47, 1994, 275-85. Jay, P. 1984. Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lewis, R. W. B. 1955. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lin, E. T. 2003. `Mona on the Phone: the performative body and racial identity in Mona in the Promised Land’. MELUS, 28.2, Summer 2003, 47-57. Lynn, K. S. 1959. Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown. Marx, L. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Messent, P. 1997. Mark Twain. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Millard, K. 2007. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction, Edinburgh University Press. Moretti, F. 1987. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso. Pinsker, S. 1993. The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence Under Pressure. New York: Twayne. Ravits, M. 1989. `Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping’. American Literature, 61, 4, December 1989, 644-666. Rosowski, S. J. 1999. Birthing A Nation, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ryan, M. 1991. `Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: The Subversive Narrative and the New American Eve’, South Atlantic Review, 56, 1, January 1991, 79-86. Said, E. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books. Salzberg, J. (ed). 1990. Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Mass.: G. K. Hall. Salzman, J. (ed). 1991. New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spacks, P. 1981. The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination. New York: Basic Books. Steinle, P. H. 2000. In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye, Censorship Controversies, and Postwar American Character. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Stone, A. E. 1961. The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Walker, E. A. 1994. `Josephine Humphreys’s Rich in Love: Redefining Southern Fiction’. Mississippi Quarterly, 47, 1994, 301-15. White, B. 1985. Growing up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

56 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

Naturalist Fiction

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION

Course Organiser: Dr Keith Hughes

This course will look at the development of ‘naturalist’ fiction in the late 19th and early-20th century and its importance to the development of literary modernism more generally; French, British and American texts will be considered so as to give a sense of the transatlantic scope of the genre. Attention will be paid to the relationship between naturalism and other fictional styles of the period, most especially ‘realism’. We will look at the various cultural and social forces and ideas which were involved in the development of fictional naturalism as a literary style, and upon which the texts themselves reflected – these include ideas of sexual desire, evolutionary biology, racial typification, gender politics, class struggle, and the development of consumerist capitalism. Throughout the course focus will be maintained on the different ways naturalist authors have represented the seemingly opposing doctrines of determinism and free will, and the overarching importance of environment as a constituting force of literary character.

SEMINAR SCHEDULE

Week 1: Introduction:

Week 2: Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (1867)

Week 3: George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)

Week 4: George Moore, Esther Waters (1894)

Week 5: Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)

Week 6: INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK

Week 7: Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat” (1897) and “The Blue Hotel” (1898); Jack London “To Build a Fire” (1908)

Week 8: Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)

Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK

Week 10: Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

Week 11: J. MacDougall Hay, Gillespie (1914)

Week 12: Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925)

57 English Literature - Third Year Option courses

Reading Theory

English Literature Third Year Second Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Alex Thomson

This course offers a seminar-based introduction to major schools of literary and critical theory, aiming to help students understand the key debates which have shaped the discipline of literary studies over the last century. It is focused around the idea of ‘reading theory’ in three senses of that phrase. Firstly, it aims to foster the critical reading and analytic skills required to make sense of what may appear complex and forbidding texts: how do we read theory? Secondly, it introduces distinctions between different types of critical reading to help differentiate between and compare theoretical positions. Finally, it aims to link theoretical positions back to the practice of reading, asking in each case what sort of reading does this approach to literature entail, and encouraging students to develop their own understanding of the study of literature. Topics to be covered will include aesthetic, political, linguistic and historical approaches to reading literature, along with more contemporary critical questions such as the impact of technology and globalization. By the end of the course students should be able to: demonstrate detailed knowledge and comparative understanding of a range of theoretical approaches to literary studies; critically analyse and contextualise key writings by literary, critical and cultural theorists; critically reflect on their own approach to literary study in the light of the theories studied.

NB: Although the subject matter of the course overlaps with the latter lectures of ENLI10306 Critical Practice: Criticism, this course has been designed with minimal repetition of texts. Students who have taken the latter course will find it helpful background; but students who have not taken that course will not be disadvantaged.

Seminar Schedule Week 1: Criticism, Theory and Reading: Marx, various extracts [NTC: 647-676]; Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’ [NTC: 764-774]; Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams [NTC: 814-824]; Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Contingencies of Value’ [NTC: 1798-1818].

Week 2: Authors and Readers: Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ [NTC: 1322-1326]; Stanley Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’ [NTC: 1974-1992]; Annette Kolodny, ‘Dancing through the minefield’ [NTC: 2045-2067].

Week 3: The Frankfurt School: History and Politics: Gyorgy Lukacs, from The Historical Novel [NTC: 909-921]; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility’ [NTC: 1051-1071]; Adorno & Horkheimer, from Dialectic of Enlightenment [NTC: 1110-1127]; Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ [NTC: 1846-1860].

Week 4: Structuralism and Language: Ferdinand de Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics [NTC: 850-867]; Mikhail Bakhtin, from ‘Discourse in the Novel’ [NTC: 1076-1086]; Roman Jakobson, from ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ [NTC: 1144-1152].

Week 5: Psychoanalysis and Language. Jacques Lacan, from ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’ [NTC: 1169-1181]; from ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ [NTC: 1181-1189]; Julia Kristeva, from Revolution in Poetic Language [NTC: 2071-2080].

Week 6: Innovative Learning Week

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Week 7: From Feminism to Queer Theory: Simone de Beauvoir, from ‘The Second Sex’ [NTC: 1625-1273]; Monique Wittig, ‘One is Not Born a Woman’ [NTC: 1906-1913]; Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble [NTC: 2540-2552]; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from Epistemology of the Closet [NTC 2470-2477]; Judith Halberstam, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Men, Women and Masculinity’ [NTC: 2638-2653].

Week 8: Post-Structuralism: from sovereignty to power: Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish [NTC: 1490-1502]; from The History of Sexuality [NTC: 1502-1521]; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, from Thousand Plateaux [NTC: 1454-1462]; Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri, from Empire [NTC: 2621-2635]

Week 9: Essay Completion Week

Week 10: Technology and Posthumanism: N. Katherine Hayles, from How We Became Posthuman [NTC: 2165- 2187]; Donna Haraway, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ [NTC: 2190-2220].

Week 11: Deconstruction and the politics of writing: Plato, from Phaedrus [NTC: 77-83]; Claude Levi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques [NTC: 1277-1286]; Jacques Derrida, from Dissemination [NTC: 1697-1734].

Week 12: Reading the contemporary: globalization, identity, labour: Jacques Derrida, from Specters of Marx [NTC: 1734-1744]; bell hooks, ‘Postmodern Blackness’ [NTC: 2507-2516]; Lisa Lowe, ‘Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics [NTC: 2519-2535]; Paul Gilroy, from The Black Atlantic [NTC: 2556-2575]; Andrew Ross, from ‘The Mental Labour Problem’ [NTC: 2578-2597].

Primary Reading: All primary materials will be drawn from the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd edition) [NTC].

Indicative Secondary Bibliography: Detailed reading lists will be supplied for individual seminars. Ayers, David. Literary Theory: A Reintroduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Baldick, Chris. Criticism and Literary Theory: 1890 to the Present. Harlow: Longman, 1996. Bowie, Andrew. From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1997. Castle, Gregory. The Blackwell Guide to Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Culler, Jonathan, Literary Criticism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Day, Gary. Literary Criticism: A New History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Groden, Michael & Kreiswirth, Martin. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Iser, Wolfgang. How to Do Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. London: Athlone, 1980. Lentricchia, Frank & McLauglin, Thomas eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (2nd edn.) Parrinder, Patrick. Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism, 1750-1990. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. Rapaport, Herman. The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011. Waugh, Patricia, ed. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wellek, René & Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949.

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Postcolonial Writing

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

Course Organiser: Dr Michelle Keown

This course will introduce students to some of the key texts and critical debates within postcolonial literary studies, ranging from the colonial fiction of E.M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling to contemporary novels (from Africa, South Asia, and the U.S.); the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson; and the British-Asian television comedy series Goodness Gracious Me. Primary texts will be explored with reference to a range of key terms and topics including (inter alia) orientalism, counter-discourse, mimicry, nationalism, ethnicity and subjectivity, diaspora, language, the body. We will also interrogate the significance of the term ‘postcolonial’ itself. What are the differences between imperialism and colonialism, or postcolonialism and post-colonialism, for instance? Or what are the limitations of the ‘postcolonial’ label? In debating the latter we will investigate points of intersection between postcolonial theory and other critical and political traditions such as feminism, Marxism and postmodernism. We will also explore the ways in which contemporary racial conflict (as evident, for example, in Islamophobia and the global ‘war on terror’) has its roots in stereotypes attached to the racial ‘other’ in colonial discourse (and here we will draw on the work of key postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak).

Seminars

Please come to the first class having read the Forster, Kipling, Slemon and Said material.

Week 1: Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse E.M. Forster, A Passage to India; Rudyard Kipling, ‘White Man’s Burden’ (on LEARN); extracts from Edward Said’s Orientalism and Stephen Slemon’s ‘The Scramble for Post- Colonialism’ (in The Postcolonial Studies Reader). Week 2: Hybridity and Mimicry V.S. Naipaul, ‘Man-Man’ (on LEARN); Rudyard Kipling, ‘Bubbling Well Road’ (on Project Gutenberg website) http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page Week 3: Spivak and the subaltern Arundhathi Roy; The God of Small Things; Lakshmi Kannan, ‘Muniyakka’ (on LEARN) Week 4: Nationalism and Culture Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat Week 5: Postcolonialism and Feminism/Gender Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions Week 6 INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK Week 7: The Body and Ethnicity Toni Morrison, Beloved Week 8: Diaspora, migrancy and exile Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette (screenplay and film) Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 10: Language Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard Linton Kwesi Johnson, selected dub poetry

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Week 11: Settler subjectivities Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’; Henry Lawson, ‘The Drover’s Wife’; Nadine Gordimer, ‘Six Feet of the Country’; Margaret Atwood, ‘Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer’ (details to be posted on LEARN). Week 12: Counter discourse: humour, satire, postmodern play Selected prose by Epeli Hau’ofa and Albert Wendt (on LEARN); discussion of ‘ethnic’ television comedy series Goodness Gracious Me and Bro’ Town

Course Texts

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2005, ISBN 0415345650) Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions (Ayebia Clarke, 2004, ISBN 0954702336) Forster, E.M. A Passage to India (Penguin, 1998, 0140274235) Kureishi, Hanif. My Beautiful Laundrette (Faber and Faber, 2000, 0571202543) Morrison, Toni. Beloved (Vintage, 1997, 0099760118) Ngugi. A Grain of Wheat (Penguin, 2002, 0141186993) Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things (Flamingo, 1998, 0066550681) Tutuola, Amos, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Faber and Faber, 1977, 0571049966)

Strongly recommended for purchase:

Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. London: Longman, 1994. ISBN 0745014917.

Selected Secondary Reading

A: Material on/by specific authors

Tsitsi Dangarembga Aegerter, Lindsay, ‘A Dialectic of Autonomy and Community: Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15.2 (1996): 231-40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/464133

E.M. Forster Rapport, Nigel. The prose and the passion: anthropology, literature and the writing of E.M. Forster. Manchester University Press, 1994. Routledge Literary Sourcebook on E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. London: Routledge, 2002.

Hanif Kureishi Kaleta, Kenneth C. Hanif Kureishi: postcolonial storyteller. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1998. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Hanif Kureishi. Manchester University Press, 2001.

Toni Morrison Duvall, John N. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: modernist authenticity and postmodern blackness. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Eckard, Paula Gallant. Maternal body and voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2002. McKay, Nellie Y. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston, Mass.: Hall, 1988. Morrison, Toni. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

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V.S. Naipaul King, Bruce Alvin. V.S. Naipaul. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing the mind: the politics of language in African literature. London: James Currey, 1986. Ogude, James. Ngugi’s novels and African history. London: Pluto, 1999. Parker, Michael and Starkey, Roger (eds). Postcolonial literatures : Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Sicherman, Carol. Ngugi wa Thiong’o: the making of a rebel; a source book in Kenyan literature and resistance. London: Zed, 1990.

Arundhati Roy Dodiya, Jaydipsinh and Joya Chakravarty (eds). The Critical Studies of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2001. Sharma, R.S. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: critique and commentary. New Delhi: Creative Books, 1998.

Amos Tutuola Lindfors, Bernth (ed.). Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola. London: Heinemann, 1980. Wangman, Pauline Turner. Telling Tales: Literary Perspectives of West Africa. Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, 1986.

B: Postcolonial Theory/Criticism

Bill Ashcroft et al. (eds), The Empire Writes Back, Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) Homi Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration (1990) Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures (1995) L. Chrisman and B. Parry (eds), Postcolonial Theory and Criticism (2000) Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (1990) Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (1998) Kadiatu Kanneh, African identities: race, nation and culture in ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black literatures (1998) Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987) Neil Lazarus, Resistance in postcolonial African fiction (1990) Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999) Ania Loomba, Colonialism-Postcolonialism (1998) John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (2000) Trinh Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989) Susheila Nasta (ed), Motherlands (1991) A. Parker et al. (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992) Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism (2000) Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: identities in question in colonial and postcolonial India (1998) Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (1992) I. Talit, The Language of Postcolonial Literatures (2002) P. Williams, P. and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: a Reader (Pearson/Longman, 2003, 0745014917)

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Poetry and Northern Ireland

English Literature Third Year Second-Semester Option Course

NOT RUNNING THIS SESSION

Course Organiser: Dr Aaron Kelly

Course Summary This course appraises poetry in the North of Ireland from the 1930s to the present. It includes the Troubles period and its aftermath but also takes a look at how earlier poets dealt with the ongoing upheaval of the twentieth-century more broadly. So while political violence in Northern Ireland since the 1960s is one key concern of the course, there is also an examination of how the pressures of war, the rise of Fascism and Stalinism, urbanisation and modernity impact upon poetry and its role in society. In terms of form, the course appraises the pressure put upon the lyric “I” in times of social convulsion and change, the use or appropriation of traditional forms such as the sonnet in poetry from the North of Ireland, the search for appropriate models by which to express or understand the context in which poems are written, and the transnational influences upon the poets covered. The role of the poet is discussed in relation to whether this is a private or public concern, as well as the capacity of poetry to stray from conventional wisdom. Attention is given to how poetry and politics may or may not approach one another. Thematically the course also focuses on issues such as pastoral and urban aesthetics, identity and pluralism, gendered subjectivities, and history and myth.

Learning Outcomes Students will acquire an understanding of how poetry deals with the demand to “say something” in a public manner in times of social unrest. Students will be able to analyse the ways in which poets on the course balance the demands of personal creativity and public obligation; in so doing, students will be able to articulate their views on whether poetry should have such public obligations. Students will gain an awareness of how specific poetic forms are deployed in a Northern Irish context and students will therefore develop their ability to understand how and why particular forms accrue meanings and resonances in certain contexts. Students will gain knowledge of debates about whether poetry should be the mouthpiece of a society or its critical conscience; students will be able to enhance their sense of the interplay between politics and aesthetics.

Seminar Schedule

Week 1 Louis MacNeice Week 2 John Hewitt Week 3 Seamus Heaney Week 4 Derek Mahon Week 5 Michael Longley Week 6 INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK Week 7 Paul Muldoon Week 8 Medbh McGuckian Week 9 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK Week 10 Ciaran Carson Week 11 Alan Gillis

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Week 12 Leontia Flynn; Miriam Gamble (selections provided via Web CT)

Primary Texts Paul Muldoon, ed. The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 Ciaran Carson, The Ballad of HMS Belfast Alan Gillis, Hawks and Doves

Secondary Reading Brandes, Rand. ‘The Dismembering Muse: Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Kenneth Burke’s “Four Master Tropes”’ in John S. Rickard, ed. Irishness and (Post)Modernism (London: Bucknell University Press, 1994), pp.177-94. Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-79 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981). Brown, Terence. Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Gigginstown: Lilliput Press, 1988). Cleary, Joe. Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Clyde, Tom, ed. Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987). Corcoran, Neil. After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Corcoran, Neil. Poets of Modern Ireland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999). Corcoran, Neil. Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 1986). Coughlan, Patricia. ‘“Bog Queens”: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney’ in Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns, ed. Gender In Irish Writing (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp.88-111.

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