MA Issues in Modern Culture Reading List 20-21.Pdf

M.A. Issues in Modern Culture Reading List 2020–21

AUTHORS AUTUMN TERM

Dr Scarlett Baron

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary [1857], trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Gustave Flaubert, ‘A Simple Heart’, in Three Tales [1877], trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas [1913], in Bouvard and Pécuchet, with the Dictionary of Received Ideas, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

Further Reading:

Gustave Flaubert, Selected Letters, trans. Geoffrey Wall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984) Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (London: Paul Elek, 1974). Stephen Heath, Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour [1972] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1996). Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Tim Unwin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Jennifer Yee, The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

2. Henry James

Professor Philip Horne

Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904), ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Penguin Classics, 2009) This contains the ‘Preface’ to the (only very slightly different) New York Edition version of the novel (1909); the other Prefaces (collected in The Art of the Novel, ed. R.P. Blackmur, 1934; now U. of Chicago Press)

Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ (1905) Available at: https://archive.org/details/questionourspee01jamegoog/page/n9/mode/2up

Secondary Reading:

Nicola Bradbury, Henry James: The Later Novels (Oxford University Press, 1979). Jean Gooder, ‘The Golden Bowl, or Ideas of Good and Evil’, The Cambridge Quarterly , Vol. 13, No. 2 (1984), 129-146. 1

Philip Horne. ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters (Penguin, 1999) Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago, 1976). (The best book on the late style and the late fiction generally.) Thomas Galt Peyser, ‘James, Race, and the Imperial Museum’, American Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 48-70. Stuart Burrows, ‘The Golden Fruit: Innocence and Imperialism in The Golden Bowl’, Henry James Review, Vol. 21 No. 2 (Spring 2000), 95-114. Jonathan Freedman, ‘The Poetics of Cultural Decline: Degeneracy, Assimilation, and the Jew in James’s The Golden Bowl’, American Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 3, Imagining a National Culture (Autumn, 1995), 477-499.

3. James Joyce

Dr Scarlett Baron

James Joyce, Ulysses [1922], ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986) – available as a Vintage reprint. This is the best critically edited version of the text and the one referenced in most academic writing about Joyce.

For a helpful introduction and useful notes (as well as for an interesting variant text), see Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). It can also be useful to have to hand Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, ‘Ulysses’ Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (London: University of California Press, 1989).

Further Reading:

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). This edition has a good introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson. James Joyce, Dubliners [1914] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). This edition has a good introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson; I have written an introduction to the 2012 Vintage edition of the stories. James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (eds), Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (London: Faber and Faber, 1978). Terence Killeen, ‘Ulysses’ Unbound: A Reader’s Companion to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Dublin: Wordwell, 2005). Sean Latham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).

4. Virginia Woolf

Dr Scarlett Baron

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

Further Reading:

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out [1915] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries (London: Vintage, 2008). Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters (London: Vintage, 2008). Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, rev. Hermione Lee (London: Pimlico, 2002). Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Julia Briggs, Reading Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977). Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997). Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Anna Snaith, ‘Leonard and Virginia Woolf: Writing against Empire’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature (50:1), 19-32. Anna Snaith, ‘Race, Empire and Performative Activism in Late Edwardian Bloomsbury’, in The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group, ed. D. Ryan and S. Ross (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 94-108.

5. D. H. Lawrence

Dr Hugh Stevens

D. H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers! (1923) – any edition, also available on Kindle on from Project Gutenberg

Further reading:

A Banerjee, D. H. Lawrence’s Poetry: Demon Liberated. A Collection of Primary and Secondary Material (1990) Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present (2003) Sandra Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1972) Holly A. Laird, Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (1988) M. J. Lockwood, A Study of the Poetry of D. H. Lawrence: Thinking in Poetry (1987)

Gail Porter Mandell, The Phoenix Paradox: A Study of Renewal Through Change in the Collected Poems and Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1984) Ross C. Murphin, The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence: Texts and Contexts (1983) Helen Sword, Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence and H. D. (1995)

*** Reading week ***

6. Zora Neale Hurston

Dr Julia Jordan

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Further Reading:

Adrienne Brown, ‘Hard Romping: Zora Neale Hurston, White Women, and the Right to Play’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 64, no. 3 (2018): 295-316. Brian Carr and Tova Cooper, ‘Zora Neale Hurston and Modernism at the Critical Limit’, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 2 (2002): 285-313. Sharon Davie, ‘Free Mules, Talking Buzzards, and Cracked Plates: The Politics of Dislocation in Their Eyes Were Watching God’, PMLA (1993) 108: 446–59. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘Power, Judgment, and Narrative in a Work of Zora Neale Hurston: Feminist Cultural Studies’, in New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, ed. Michael Awkward, pp. 95– 123. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Rosemary V Hathaway, ‘The Unbearable Weight of Authenticity: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and a Theory of “Touristic Reading”’ Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 117, Number 464 (Spring 2004): 168-190. David Kadlec, ‘Zora Neale Hurston and the Federal Folk’, Modernism/modernity 7, no. 3 (2000): 471-485. 7. T. S. Eliot

Dr Dennis Duncan

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

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

Further Reading:

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

Ackroyd, Peter, T.S. Eliot (1984) Asher, Kenneth, T.S. Eliot and Ideology (1998) Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. T.S. Eliot, Four quartets: a casebook (1994) Bush, Ronald, ed. T.S. Eliot: the Modernist in History (1991) Cheyette, Brian, ‘Eliot and “Race”: Jews, Irish, and Blacks’, in David E. Chinitz, A Companion to T. S. Eliot (2001) Cooper, John Xiros, ed., The Cambridge introduction to T.S. Eliot (2006) Donoghue, Denis, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (2000) Ellmann, Maud The poetics of impersonality : T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (1987) Gordon, Lyndall, Eliot’s Early Years (1977) Julius, Anthony, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995) Laity, Cassandra, and Nancy. K. Gish, eds. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T.S. Eliot, (2004) Moody, David, Tracing T.S. Eliot’s spirit: essays on his poetry and thought (1996) Murphy, Russell Elliott, Critical companion to T.S. Eliot: a literary reference to his life and work (2007) North, Michael, ‘The Dialect in/of Modernism: Pound and Eliot's Racial Masquerade’, American Literary History 4.1 (1992) Raine, Craig, In Defence of T.S. Eliot (2000) Raine, Craig, T.S. Eliot (2006) Rainey, Lawrence, Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ (2005) Ricks, Christopher, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1994) Schuchard, Ronald, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (1999) Sigg, Eric W., The American T.S. Eliot: a study of the early writings (1989) Southam, B.C., A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot (1968) Glyne Griffith, ‘“This is London calling the West Indies”: The BBC’s Caribbean Voices’, in Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (2018) Schuchard, Ronald, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (1999) Sigg, Eric W., The American T.S. Eliot: a study of the early writings (1989) Southam, B.C., A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot (1968)

8. Langston Hughes

Professor Mark Ford

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel (New York, Knopf, 1994)

Secondary:

Baker, Jr. Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Chinitz, David. Which Sin to Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Dace, Trish (Ed.) Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Grogan, Kristen. ‘Langston Hughes’s Constructivist Poetics.’ American Literature. Vol. 90, No. 3 (Sept. 2018): 585-612.

Huggins, Nathaniel. Harlem Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Hughes, Langston & Carl Van Vechten. Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964. Ed. Emily Bernard. New York: Knopf, 2001. Kim, Daniel Won-Gu. ‘We, Too, Rise With You’: Recovering Langston Hughes’s Africam (Re)Turn in An African Treasury, the Chicago Defender and Black Orpheus. African American Review. Vol. 41, No. 3 (2007): 419-441. Kutzinski, Vera. The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell YP, 2012. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes (Vol 1: 1902-1941): I, Too, Sing America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. ——————. The Life of Langston Hughes (Vol 2: 1941-1967): I Dream a World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Smethurst, James Edward. The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946. Oxford. Oxford UP, 1999.

9. Ralph Ellison

Professor Matthew Beaumont

Further Reading:

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Penguin, 2001 [1952]) John F. Callahan, ed., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Oxford University Press, 2004) Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (Vintage, 1995 [1964]) Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of a Genius (Wiley, 2007) Ross Posnack, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Vintage, 2007)

10. Elizabeth Bishop

Professor Mark Ford

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (Chatto and Windus & Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)

Please read widely in Bishop's poetry, including these poems: The Map – The Fish – A Cold Spring – Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance – The Bight – At the Fishhouses – Brazil, January 1, 1502 – Questions of Travel – First Death in Nova Scotia – Filling Station – Manuelzinho – The Riverman – In the Waiting Room – Crusoe in England – Poem – One Art – The End of March – Five Flights Up – North Haven – Sonnet.

Further Reading:

The Collected Prose (Chatto and Windus & Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984)

One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994) Exchanging Hats: Paintings, ed.William Benton (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996) Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006) Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (Faber, 2008) Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Joelle Bielle (FSG, 2011)

Websites:

These four websites are a very good place to start. They include critical debate on poems, biographical and other information, links to Bishop reading and being interviewed, and more detailed bibliographical matter. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/bishop.htm http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/us_poetry/Bishop/ http://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/Bishop.html http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleid=420

Further reading:

David Bromwich, Skeptical Music (2001) Anne Colwell, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997). Bonnie Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Lorrie Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, (revised edition, 1989) Lionel Kelly (ed.), Poetry and the Sense of Panic: Critical Essays on John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop (Rodopi, 2000) Marilyn May Lombardi, The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995) Lombardi, Marilyn May, ed. The Geography of Gender (University Press of Virginia, 1993) (See especially the essay on ‘In the Waiting Room’ by Lee Edelman) Essays on Elizabeth Bishop From The 1997 Elizabeth Bishop Conference At WPI (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) George Monteiro (ed.), Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1996) Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (1998) Thomas Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (1988) Thomas Travisano, Modernist Quartet (2000) Helen Vendler, ‘The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13 (1987), 825-838

AUTHORS SPRING TERM

1. Patricia Highsmith

Dr Matthew Sperling

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)

Further reading:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘Letter to My Son’. The Atlantic. July 4, 2015 Robert Tomlinson, ‘“Payin’ One’s Dues”: Expatriation as Personal Experience and Paradigm in the Works of James Baldwin’. African American Review. Spring 1999 (33.1) G. Douglas Atkins, ‘The Work of the Sympathetic Imagination: James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son’ (in Reading Essays: An Invitation, 2008) James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’ (The New Yorker, November 10, 1962) James Baldwin, ‘A Letter to My Nephew’ (The Progressive, December 1, 1962) James Baldwin, ‘On Being “White”…And Other Lies’ (in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, 1998) Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015) (*NB: an excerpt of Coates’s book is available under the title ‘A Letter to My Son’ in The Atlantic [July 4, 2015]) Eddie Glaude, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020) Cora Kaplan and Bill Schwarz, James Baldwin: America and Beyond (2011) Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) Lauren Rusk, The Life Writing of Otherness: Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson (2002) Robert Tomlinson, ‘“Payin’ One’s Dues”: Expatriation as Personal Experience and Paradigm in the Works of James Baldwin’ (African American Review, spring 1999 [33.1])

3. Alfred Hitchcock

Professor Philip Horne

Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Rear Window (1954) Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Psycho (1960)

Further Viewing:

Rebecca (1940) Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Spellbound (1945); Notorious (1946) Strangers on a Train (1951) Rear Window (1954) The Wrong Man (1957) Vertigo (1958); North by Northwest (1959) The Birds (1963) Marnie (1964) Frenzy (1972) Family Plot (1976) Further Reading:

Richard Allen & S. Ishi Gonzalès, Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (bfi Publishing, London 1999). Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (A Movie Book: Cameron and Hollis, Moffat (Scotland), 1999). Jonathan Coe, James Stewart, Leading Man (Bloomsbury: London, 1994). Steven DeRosa, Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes (Faber, 2001) Raymond Durgnat, A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’ (BFI, 2002) Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (Faber: London, 1974) Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (University of California Press: London, 1995). Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (2003) Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (Methuen: London & New York, 1988) Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Psycho’ (Norton, 1990) Eric Rohmer & Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (Ungar: New York, 1979; first published as Hitchcock (Presses Universitaires: Paris, 1957)) Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (W.H. Allen: London, 1977) Donald Spoto, Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius (Collins: London, 1983) John Russell Taylor, The Life and Work of Alfred Hitchcock (Faber: London, 1978) François Truffaut, Hitchcock [1968] (Granada, 1978) Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited [a revision of the 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films] (Columbia University Press, 1989 Jonathan J. Cavallero, ‘Hitchcock and Race: Is the Wrong Man a White Man?’ Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter 2010), 3-14. ‘The MacGuffin’ webpage, ed. Ken Mogg (‘Alfred Hitchcock Scholars Meet Here!’): links to many sources: available at http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/ The Internet Movie Data Base, of course: available at www.imdb.com

4. Bob Dylan

Professor Mark Ford and Professor Phil Horne

Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde (1966) ––––––––. Blood on the Tracks (1975)

Further Listening: Highway 61 Revisited (1965) Bringing It All Back Home (1965) Oh Mercy (1989) Love and Theft (2001) Biograph (1985) The Bootleg Series Vols 1-3 (1991) are good compilations ‘Murder Most Foul’ on Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ on The Times They Are A Changin’ (1964)

Further Reading: John Bauldie (ed.), Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan (1992) Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2004) Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (2000) Michael Gray & John Bauldie (eds), All Across the Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook (1987) Clinton Heylin, Behind the Shades Revisited (2001) Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003; see chapter on ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’) David Yaffe, Chapter 3: ‘Not Dark Yet: How Bob Dylan Got His Groove Back’, in his Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (Yale University Press, 2011) Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Chapter 15: ‘Crow Jane Approximately: Bob Dylan’s Black Masque’ in Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss (editors), Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) Robert Reginio, Chapter 17: ‘“Nettie Moore”: Minstrelsy and the Cultural Economy of Race in Bob Dylan’s Late Albums’ in Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss (editors), Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2009)

5. Octavia Butler

Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao

Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)

Further Reading:

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

Shelley Streeby, Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science Fiction and Activism Mark Jerng, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction

*** Reading Week ****

6. Maxine Hong Kingston

Dr Xine Yao

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976)

Claire Jean Kim, ‘The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.’ Politics & Society 27.1 (1999) Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

7. J.M. Coetzee

Dr Scarlett Baron

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

Further Reading:

J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992). J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello [2003] (London: Vintage, 2004). J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). J.M. Coetzee, Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005 (London: Vintage, 2008). J.M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 (London: Vintage, 2002).

Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). David Attwell, ‘Race in Disgrace’, Interventions, 4:3 (2002), 331-341. David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee & the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). Patrick Hayes, J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Jarad Zimbler, J.M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 11

8. Philip Roth

Dr Scarlett Baron

Philip Roth, The Human Stain [2000] (London: Vintage, 2001).

Further Reading:

Philip Roth, ‘Writing American Fiction’ and ‘Writing About Jews’, in Reading Myself and Others [1975] (London: Vintage, 2016). Philip Roth, American Pastoral [1997] (London, Vintage, 1998).

David Brauner, Philip Roth (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007). Dean J. Franco (ed.), ‘Roth and Race’, special issue of Roth Studies, 2:2 (Fall 2006). Patrick Hayes, Philip Roth: Fiction and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Hermione Lee, Philip Roth (New York: Methuen, 1982). Timothy Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). George J. Searles (ed.), Conversations with Philip Roth (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992).

Further Viewing:

Philip Roth Unleashed I and Philip Roth Unleashed II, instalments of a BBC One Imagine series featuring a survey of Roth’s life and oeuvre as well as some snippets of conversation between the host Alan Yentob and the author.

9. David Simon

Professor Matthew Beaumont

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

Further Viewing:

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

Further Reading:

Alvarez, Rafael, The Wire: Truth Be Told (Canongate, 2009) Anderson, P.A., ‘“The Game Is the Game”: Tautology and Allegory in The Wire,’ Criticism, 52.3 (2010): 373-98 Jameson, Fredric, ‘Realism and Utopia in The Wire,’ Criticism, 52.3-4 (2010): 359-372 Klein, A. A. (2009) ‘“The Dickensian Aspect”: Melodrama, Viewer Engagement and the Socially Conscious Text’; in T. Potter and C.W. Marshall (eds), The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, (Continuum, 2009), 177-189

Marshall, C.W. and Potter, T., ‘“I am the American Dream”: Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction,’ in Marshall and Potter (eds), The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, (Continuum, 2009), 1-14. Simon, David, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (Canongate, 1991) Linda Williams, On The Wire (2014)

10. Colson Whitehead

Dr Matthew Sperling

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor (2009), Zone One (2011), The Underground Railroad (2016)

Further Reading:

Martin Luther King, 'Address at Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, D.C.' , 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail', 'Address at Cornell College', hosted at the The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University

Roger Dean Kiser, The White House Boys: An American Tragedy (2009)

CONTEXTS: MODERNITY AND THE CITY

AUTUMN TERM

1. Modernity and the City

Dr Julia Jordan

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

Primary Reading:

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

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

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

If possible, please also read:

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

Further Reading:

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Flâneur’ from Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso Books). Rachel Bowlby, ‘Walking, Women and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flâneuse’, in Still Crazy After All these Years (London: Routledge, 1992). Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (MIT Press, 1997) Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: the (Feminine) Art of Walking in Cities (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016)

2. City Symphonies: Early Cinema and the City

Professor Matthew Beaumont

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

Further Reading:

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

3. Hauntings

Dr Owen Holland

Margaret Oliphant, A Beleaguered City (1880) in A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen, ed. Jenni Calder (Canongate, 2000) Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, transl. Peggy Kamuf (Routledge, 1994)

Further Reading:

Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics and the BBC, 1922-38 (Ashgate, 2007) Debra Rae Cohen et al., Broadcasting Modernism (University Press of Florida, 2013)

Glyne Griffith, ‘“This is London calling the West Indies”: The BBC’s Caribbean Voices’, in Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (2018) Douglas Kahn (ed.), Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT, 1994) Darrell Newton, ‘Calling the West Indies: The BBC World Service and Caribbean Voices’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28.4 (2008)

5. Blackness and the City

Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao

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

Further Reading:

William A Gleason, Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘The Case for Reparations’ Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Books; Adrienne Brown, ‘The Black Skyscraper’ Neil Smith, "Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People." Journal of the American Planning Association 45.4 (1979) Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race

6. Art and the City: the New York School

Dr Linda Freedman

In 1959 the director of MOMA described the new American painting as ‘a stubborn, difficult, even desperate attempt to discover the “self” or “reality”, an effort to which the whole personality should be recklessly committed: I paint therefore I am. Confronting a blank canvas they attempt to “grasp authentic being by action, decision, a leap of faith” to use Karl Jasper’s existentialist phrase.’ Many of the artists involved, however, maintained the importance of subject matter outside the self. Grace Hartigan claimed: ‘I have found my subject, it concerns that which is vulgar and vital in American modern life, and the possibilities of its transcendence into the beautiful.’ William de Kooning wrote: ‘Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.’

This seminar will look at the importance of little magazines in forging bonds and creating shared ideas, ambitions and philosophical directives for writers, musicians and artists living in New York in the years immediately following the Second World War. We will discuss new ways of imagining the cityscape: the role of myth, history and contemporary cold war threat. We will explore the space between art and politics and the aesthetics of spontaneity, performance and the body as well as issues surrounding canon formation and reception. In addition to the suggested background reading, you might like to browse the websites of MOMA for images by

Grace Hartigan, George Baziotes, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, whose paintings we will discuss in detail.

Reading list:

Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique ed. Ellen Landau (available online via Explore). Essential collection of primary writings and secondary criticism. Good for thinking about canon formation and related questions of gendered, racial and political tensions in the cold war era. Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997) – Thematic and beautifully illustrated monograph focusing on embedded racism, misogyny and homophobia as prime motivating forces behind the art world's institutionalisation of abstract expressionism. David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (CUP, 1999). Good on cold war politics. David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990)- Basic overview David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism: A World Elsewhere (Haunch of Venison, 2008). Exhibition catalogue curated by one of the first art-historians of Abstract Expressionism. Problems of Contemporary Art: Possibilities 1 An Occasional Review Winter 1947/8 – the single issue magazine that showcased the emergent abstract expressionism. Available at British Library on request. The New American Painting Arranged by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Arts Council of Great Britain 24th Feb-22nd March 1959, The Tate Gallery, London – key exhibition catalogue which toured internationally. Stephen C. Foster, The Critics of Abstract Expressionism (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1980) – An assessment of the critical historiography of Abstract Expressionism

7. Filming New York

Professor Philip Horne

Films by Martin Scorsese:

Taxi Driver (1976) The King of Comedy (1983)

Further Viewing:

Mean Streets (1974) Italianamerican (1974) New York, New York (1977) Raging Bull (1980) After Hours (1985) GoodFellas (1990) Bringing Out the Dead (1999) The Irishman (2019)

Further Reading:

Peter Brunette (ed.), Martin Scorsese Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999) Ian Christie and David Thompson (eds), Scorsese on Scorsese (Faber, 2003) Philip Horne, ‘Three and a Half Hours with Scorsese’ (interview on The Irishman), Sight & Sound, November 2019, 20-29. Kevin Jackson (ed.), Schrader on Schrader (Faber, 1992) Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver, screenplay (Faber, 1990; suggestive about racism in Taxi Driver) Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California, 1972) Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (Faber 1999; book of excellent long documentary) Martin Scorsese & Nicholas Pileggi, Goodfellas (script), Faber Amy Taubin, Taxi Driver (London: British Film Institute, 2000: contains suggestive discussions of race) Michael Henry Wilson, Scorsese on Scorsese (Cahiers du Cinéma, 2011) Paul A. Woods (ed.), Scorsese: A Journey through the American Psyche (Plexus) For early script for The King of Comedy, see http://sfy.ru/sfy.html?script=king_of_comedy Jonathan J. Cavallero , Chapter 2: ‘Martin Scorsese: Confined and Defined by Ethnicity’ in his Hollywood’s Italian American Filmmakers: Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino Book (University of Illinois Press, 2011) Chapter Title: Martin Scorsese: A SOJOURN FROM ITALIAN AMERICAN TO WHITE ETHNIC AMERICAN Paul Lopes, Art Rebels: Race, Class, and Gender in the Art of Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese (Princeton University Press, 2019).

8. Queer Fictions and the City

Dr Hugh Stevens

Oscar Moore, A Matter of Life and Sex, 1991; London: Penguin, 1992. Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony (1997); New York: Vintage, 1998

Further reading: Darius Bost, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence, 2019 James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956) Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964) John Rechy, City of Night (1963), Numbers (1967), The Sexual Outlaw (1977) Larry Kramer, Faggots (1978) Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (1978), The Beauty of Men (1996), Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988), The Farewell Symphony (1997) – these three novels make up an autobiographical trilogy; Skinned Alive (short stories, 1995), The Married Man (2000), My Lives (memoir, 2005), The Joy of Gay Sex (a sex guide co-written with Charles Silverstein, 1977), States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (essays, 1980) Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), The Spell (1998), The Line of Beauty (2004) 18

9. Interior Spaces

Dr Matthew Sperling

J. G. Ballard, ‘Billennium’ (1961) and ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989), in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (Fourth Estate), volumes 1 and 2 respectively Emma Donoghue, Room (2010) Harold Pinter, The Caretaker (1960)

Further reading:

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

SPECIAL TOPICS

SPRING TERM

1. Complicated Feelings

Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao

How do we feel moved – or not moved – by our feelings and the feelings of others? Justifications for the importance of literature often rely upon the equation of empathy and political change, what Harriet Beecher Stowe famously phrased as “to feel right” in her call to abolish slavery. Feelings, affects, emotions are personally and politically complicated: mixed, ugly, inarticulate, and even seemingly absent. This Option traces the arc of the impact of the nineteenth-century American culture of sentiment to contemporary poetic and theoretical writings for how feelings and their subjects are produced through literary devices and cultural conventions. We will read formative primary texts that articulate complementary and combative modes of feeling across different configurations of race, gender, and sexuality. Our secondary readings include differing approaches to questions about feeling from Enlightenment philosophy to queer and affect theory to Black and Indigenous studies.

1) Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1885) 2) Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy (1892) 3) Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) 4) Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014) 5) Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You (2018)

Preliminary Secondary Reading (rough chronological order for sense of intellectual history)  Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (online) o Part III “On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions” (focus on the opening and definitions; you may wish to skim Part IV “Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions”)  Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (online) o Section 1 Chapter 1 “Of Sympathy” (you may skim Chapters 2-5)  Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (online) o Introduction  Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You” (Moodle)  Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn” (Moodle)  Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (scan TBD) o Introduction  Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought” (Moodle)  Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (online) o Introduction + choose any chapter that speaks the most to your interests o You may be interested in just looking at the chapter titles in Ahmed’s The Pursuit of Happiness to have a sense of different modes of emotion she analyzes which may be germane to your research interests

 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (online) o Introduction, chapter “Animatedness”  Glenn Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (online) o Introduction  Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents” (Moodle)

2. Psychoanalysis and Modern Culture

Dr Benjamin Dawson

Preparation:

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

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

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

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

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

4. WAR and MASCULINITY Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Time on War and Death’ (1915) & ‘On Transience’ (1915) Freud, ‘Why War?’ (1933), SE 14 and 22, Pelican Freud, 12

Joan Rivière, ‘Hate, Greed, and Aggression’ (1937), in Joan Rivière and Melanie Klein, Love, Hate and Reparation (Norton, 1964) Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938), ed. Michèle Barrett (Penguin, 2000)

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

Select Bibliography:

Samuel Arbiser & Jorge Schneider (eds), On Freud’s ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’ (Karnac, 2013) Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard 1998 Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory Fethi Benslama, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam (Minnesota, 2009) Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body, Columbia University Press, 1986 Harold Bloom, ‘Freud and Beyond’ Ruin the Sacred Truths W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups (London: Routledge, 1998) Mikkel Borch Jakobsen, ‘The Freudian Subject: From Politics to Ethics’, October, 39, Winter 1986, also in The Emotional Tie, Stanford, 1992 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (JHU, 1996) Michel de Certeau ‘The Fiction of History: the writing of Moses and Monotheism’, The Writing of History, Columbia 1988 J. M. Coetzee, ‘Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka's “The Burrow”’. MLN, 96.3, 556–79 Farhad Dalal, Race, Colour and the Process of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology (Routledge, 2002) Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever Christopher Lane (ed.), The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia UP, 1998) Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Unconscious is De-structured like an Affect’ and ‘From Where is Psychoanalysis Possible?’, Stanford Literature Review, 6 and 8, 1991, 1992 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975) Franco Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, 1966, Indiana University Press, 1975 Dennis B Klein Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Chicago, 1981 Melanie Klein, ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations reflected in the Work of Art’ in Selected Melanie Klein Daniel Pick War Machine: The rationalisation of slaughter in the modern age (Yale, 1993) Sabah Siddiqui and Ian Parker (eds), Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam (Routledge, 2018) Anthony Sampson, “Freud on the State, Violence, and War”, Diacritics 35.3 (2005), 78-91 Eric Santner, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (Yale University Press, 1991)

3. Contemporary British and American Poetry

Professor Mark Ford, Dr Eric Langley, and Dr Matthew Sperling

WEEK 1 (MF): Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014), and Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Cape, 2017). For my second, I will teach

WEEK 2 (EL): Denise Riley, Say Something Back (Picador, 2016), and Peter Gizzi, Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2020)

WEEK 3 (MS): Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), and Will Harris, RENDANG (Granta, 2020)

WEEK 4 (MF): Kei Miller, In Nearby Bushes (Carcanet, 2019), and Jay Bernard, Surge (Chatto & Windus, 2019)

WEEK 5 (MF, EL, & MS): Various. This week will be reserved for the students’ own choice of texts. Led by the tutors, each student will be asked to present on a recent poem of their own choosing.

This module – led by three of the department’s own published creative writers – is re-designed each year to allow students to engage with a selection of poetry from our direct contemporaries, looking in detail at a deliberately small number of texts, but also allowing us to range widely across the current poetry scene.

This year, in Week One, Mark Ford will introduce you to Claudia Rankine’s celebrated book- length poem Citizen from 2014 – a poetic study of racial tension and contested identities that seeks, in Rankine’s words, ‘to pull lyric back into its realities’ – alongside Ocean Vuong’s prize- winning Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a remarkable debut collection tackling the often traumatic implications of family, origins, and memory. Later in the term, in Week Four, Mark’s second seminar will consider Kei Miller’s magical and murderous latest, In Nearby Bushes, a poetic cartography of contemporary Jamaica, alongside Jay Bernard’s Surge, a collection responding to the scandal of the New Cross Fire revisited in the light of both Windrush and Grenfell. In Week Two, Eric Langley will introduce students to two recent collections by Forward prize winner Denise Riley (‘a deeply moving document of maternal grief and loss by one of our finest writers’) and the influential American poet Peter Gizzi. Poems from these collections will be discussed in relation to extracts from Riley’s philosophical prose (from ‘Time Lived Without Its Flow’ and The Words of Selves, in particular), to consider contemporary iterations of elegy, the place of politics and nature of narrative in poetry (as Gizzi says, ‘I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen’), and the voice of a lyric subject. Led by Matthew Sperling, in Week Three, we will read debut collections by two younger British poets, Sarah Howe and Will Harris, both of which reflect on their authors’ mixed heritages and on the ways in which lyric form negotiates with historical and political pressures of various kinds.

In the final week, students will be asked to present to the group their own choice of contemporary poem, hopefully thereby introducing all of us to a wide range of the most interesting recent writing.

In preparation for this module, we would like you to familiarise yourself with the set texts, and to be on the look out for the best of the new. The following websites may be useful:

The Poetry Foundation available at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ The Poetry Archive available at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/ Archive of the Now available at: http://www.archiveofthenow.org/

Selected Further Reading:

Nigel Alderman and C.D. Blanton (ed.), Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) Neal Alexander and David Cooper (ed.), Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-War Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013) Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry 1966–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Eric Falci, The Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Edward Larrissy, The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry 1945-2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Natalie Pollard, Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) Peter Robinson, Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Michael Thurston and Nigel Alderman, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2014) David Wheatley, Contemporary British Poetry (London: Palgrave, 2014)

4. History and Fantasy in Modernist Literature

Professor Pete Swaab

Modernist writers often liked to think of themselves as making it new, but they also occupied themselves in re-imagining the old. These seminars ask how we might characterise and compare the ‘historical method’ used by some major figures working in the diverse genres of poetry, fiction and film. Starting with the first big batch of Pound’s Cantos, we will go on to look at other works ‘including history’ (in Pound’s phrase), works less often considered as part of Modernism but likewise giving a permission to fantasy and calling on the resources of literary experiment. What kinds of desire are embodied in such works and how far is desire restrained by the weight of the past? How do these writers think about twentieth- century wars, economic depression and changing gender politics through historical precedents and analogues? How exemplary are the histories they depict and how transparent? What kinds of scepticism and innovation do they bring to historical narrative?

1. Epic history. Ezra Pound, Cathay, 1915; A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930) 2. Ironic history. Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner that Held Them (1948) 3. History and fantasy: Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman's Creek (1941), Noel Coward, Cavalcade (1931). 4. American history: religion, race, state. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) 5. Wartime history: past and present in Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941), Powell and Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

Preliminary General Reading: ed. Kristin Bluemel. Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) Donald Davie. Studies in Ezra Pound (Carcanet, 1991) Lara Feigel. Literature, Cinema and Politics 1930-45: Reading Between the Frames (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) eds Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone. Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (Routledge, 2003) Alison Light. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (Routledge, 1991) George Lukacs. The Historical Novel (1947, tr. 1962) Jan Montefiore. Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (Routledge, 1996) Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations (eg ed. Daniel Breazeale, Cambridge University Press, 1997) Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (Cambridge University Press, 1922; online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39537/39537-h/39537-h.htm). Bill Schwarz. ‘“Already the Past”: Memory and Historical Time’, in Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition, eds Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (Transaction Publishers, 2005)

5. Contemporary Fiction

Matthew Sperling, Xine Yao, and Hugh Stevens

Week One: David Szalay, All That Man Is (2016) [MS] Week Two: Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017) [MS] Week Three: Anna Burns, Milkman (2018) [HS] Week Four: Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019) [XY] Week Five: Frances Leviston, The Voice in My Ear (2020) [MS]

This team-taught module will focus on one text from each of the last five years, taking a cross- section of contemporary English-language fiction and considering some of its important trends and impulses. In week one, we will read David Szalay’s collection of linked stories, All That Man Is, which deals with globalization and masculinity in the years after the financial crisis. In week two, attention turns to Sally Rooney’s debut novel, much concerned with sexual politics and the social practices of millennial life. In week three, the focus will be on Milkman by Anna Burns, a novel set during the Troubles in 1970s Belfast that looks back on the recent past in the light of contemporary feminism. In week four, themes elicited from Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, will include queerness, migrant life, US imperialism and Southeast Asian racialization. And in week five, we will read Frances Leviston’s The Voice in My Ear, a group of linked stories that each features a protagonist called Claire.

In the course of the module, we will consider how contemporary fiction responds to, and shapes understanding of, current debates and phenomena (for instance, Brexit, the #metoo movement, or social media), and how its literary forms and conceptions of subjectivity relate to, and diverge from, the modernist and postmodernist conventions of the twentieth century. We will pay close attention to the verbal and formal qualities of these novels, and to their social, historical and political contexts. We will also consider the importance of the ways in which writers are situated within literary culture, discussing how authorial identities are constructed and packaged for a literary readership, and how the reading and reception of contemporary fiction is shaped by institutions of literature such as books journalism, literary prizes, and academic discourse.

Selected Introductory Reading: Most of the critical debate about the set texts is found outside of academic publications, and can be searched for online. The following general and introductory books on contemporary fiction may also be useful:

Sian Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard (ed.), Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (2013) Nick Bentley, Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh, 2008) Peter Boxall, Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013) Peter Boxall, The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018 (2019) Peter Childs and James Green, Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels (2013) David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (2012) Daniel Lea, Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices (2016) Daniel O'Gormon and Robert Eaglestone (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (2019)

6. The Literature Machine

Dr Dennis Duncan

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

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

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

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

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

Week 5: Where Are We Now? In the age of neural networks and Big Data, treatments of the literature machine are notably darker than those we have seen so far. We’ll finish off by looking at the responses to a computer-generated poem published in an august literary journal, and at Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island which wonders whether the machine might not already be with us.

Reading: Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (London: Vintage, 2016); ‘Zach Scholl’, ‘For the Bristlecone Snag’, The Archive (2011): 32-33

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