Study information

Contemporary Literature and Culture: Politics, Identity, Place

Module titleContemporary Literature and Culture: Politics, Identity, Place
Module codeHUC3044
Academic year2022/3
Credits30
Module staff

Professor Natalie Pollard (Convenor)

Duration: Term123
Duration: Weeks

11

Number students taking module (anticipated)

50

Module description

This module introduces you to a range of late-20C and 21C literary and cultural artefacts that raise urgent questions about art’s role in the conflicted political and ecological present. It looks at literary narratives that confront colonialism, capitalism and social inequality, experimental poems that undermine normative understandings of gender, sexuality and racial privilege, digital performances and hybrid media forms that challenge canonical concepts of ‘the literary’ and the practices by which it has been valued. During the module, you will compare and contrast canonical trends, artistic styles, ideologies and cultural tendencies in work published and performed in North America, Britain, Ireland, and South Africa. You will also explore how contemporary writing opens onto global concerns about identity, race, place and inheritance that subvert national literary identities and dominant and colonising cultural centres.

Module aims - intentions of the module

The module will increase your familiarity with contemporary texts that have responded to oppressive conditions in the nation state, to the forces of late modernity and global capitalism, to racism, and to colonising and appropriative approaches to place. It will attend to both experimental and mainstream literatures, and will cover a range of genres including: novels, short stories, creative non-fiction, digital media, and poetry.
. The aim of this module is to explore:

  • The meanings of ‘contemporary’ literature and culture, and their development out of earlier conflicted social and historical practices
  • The historical and political factors influencing a range of texts post-1970, and the predominating issues and themes that these literary and cultural artefacts are addressing
  • Key concerns in publishing and performance today, and their relation to questions of value, and to demands for decolonising canonical and anthropocentric approaches to art and culture and education
  • Current critical and theoretical writings and practices that help stimulate socially-responsible encounters with contemporary literary texts and cultural materials
  • A diverse and interdisciplinary set of textual approaches that provide creative insights into social, political and environmental transformations in late 20th century and early 21st century understandings of space and place, identity, the human in relation to the other-than-human, the role of contemporary art and culture.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

  • 1. Cogently interrelate literary and cultural movements and styles across the late 20th and early 21st centuries
  • 2. Demonstrate an informed appreciation of a range of aesthetic, historical and socio-political dimensions across contemporary literature and culture - both within and beyond the module’s core reading
  • 3. Analyse the environmental, historical, political and geographical contexts of contemporary literary and cultural works effectively, including their publishing and performance contexts and interrelations with popular cultural forms
  • 4. Conduct critical interpretations that engage intelligently with the ‘real world’ context of texts and cultural practices (e.g. the places and modes of publication, performance and distribution, a work’s intersections with different media and across art, architecture, film, broadcast, and in relation to political events and historical evidence)

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

  • 5. Demonstrate effective skills in creative critical thinking, written and verbal communication, debate and argument, and close textual analysis and research in written and oral work
  • 6. Persuasively show how a range of contemporary global issues are interlinked with the politics of narrative construction and with a longer, often problematic, intellectual history and praxis
  • 7. Cogently analyse theoretical ideas through imaginative pairings of literary and cultural works with theoretical, philosophical works

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

  • 8. Work both independently and in groups, demonstrating nuanced communication skills
  • 9. Apply appropriate research and bibliographic skills, construct a substantiated and persuasive argument, and write correct and cogent prose
  • 10. In seminars and written work, demonstrate creativity and imagination in gathering and analysing information

Syllabus plan

This module will explore the historical and political points of similarity and difference between the contemporary era and earlier literary practices in the 20C. Focusing on specific textual examples, you will (a) evaluate the role and significance of literature as part of the wider arts and humanities in responding to present-day conflict and crisis, (b) consider literature’s role in aiding exploration of the ideas, experiences, and cultural tropes that have historically shaped our relationship with the world around us.

Early weeks will form an introduction to relevant critical theory informing the study of contemporary literature and culture. Your readings for the module will progress in a chronological fashion, starting with the literary and cultural issues of the 1970s, and ending at the present day. The module will include a focus on literatures from North America, Britain and Ireland, and South Africa. A provisional sample of the shape of the course is outlined (readings are likely to change from year to year, but authors have included Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee, Zoe Wicomb, Daljit Nagra, Imtiaz Dharker, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Ali Smith, W.S. Graham, Italo Calvino):

  • Introduction: What (and When) is Contemporary Literature?
  • Memory, Time and Chronology
  • Race, Environment, Capitalism
  • The Politics of Address: Speaking to You
  • Mapping Resistance: Place, Politics and the Literary Imagination
  • South African Literature and Protest: Voice, Land & Displacement
  • ‘Black British Poetry’: Counter-canonical approaches
  • Hybridities and Betweenness: Forms and Persons
  • Sex(ualities) and Structure
  • Trans-local and Indigenous Literatures
  • Visiting artist week: a live public reading

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Scheduled Learning and Teaching ActivitiesGuided independent studyPlacement / study abroad
332670

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

CategoryHours of study timeDescription
Scheduled Learning and Teaching33Weekly teaching is by 1 lecture plus 1 seminar
Guided Independent Study33Study group meetings and preparation
Guided Independent Study70Seminar preparation
Guided Independent Study164Reading, research and essay preparation

Formative assessment

Form of assessmentSize of the assessment (eg length / duration)ILOs assessedFeedback method
Draft of 1 of the pieces of the Contemporary Project700 words1-10Oral/written feedback
Draft of the essay700 words1-10Oral/written feedback
Presentations/Student-led discussion10 minutes1-8,10Oral/written feedback

Summative assessment (% of credit)

CourseworkWritten examsPractical exams
10000

Details of summative assessment

Form of assessment% of creditSize of the assessment (eg length / duration)ILOs assessedFeedback method
Essay503000 words1-10Oral/written feedback
Contemporary project503 short writing assignments (3500 words total)1-10Oral/written feedback

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Original form of assessmentForm of re-assessmentILOs re-assessedTimescale for re-assessment
EssayEssay 3000 words1-10Referral/deferral epriod
Contemporary projectContemporary project 3500 words1-10Referral/deferral period

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

WORLD LITERATURE, POSTCOLONIAL AND ANTI-COLONIAL THEORY

  • Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? (2003)
  • Dimock, Wai Chee, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (1997)
  • Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004)
  • Pinto, Samanatha, Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (2013)
  • Ramazani, Jahan, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago UP, 2009)
  • Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, In Other Worlds: Essays In Cultural Politics (1998)
  • Walkowitz, Rebecca, ed., Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006)

TECHNOLOGY, ECOCRITICISM, AND THE BODY

  • Haraway, Donna, A Cyborg Manifesto (1984)
  • Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature (1999)
  • McGann, Jerome, Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies after the World Wide Web (2001)
  • Morton, Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People (2017)
  • Paulson, Sarah, and Anders Skare Malvik, Technology, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture (2016)
  • Perloff, Marjorie, ‘Afterimages: Revolution of the Visible Word’, Experimental, Visual, Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry since the 1960s, ed. K. David Jackson, et al (1996): 335-344.
  • Vakoch, Douglas A., ed., Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature (2012)

WORK, EDUCATION, CULTURAL STUDIES

  • Freire, Paolo, Pedagogy of the oppressed, trans. by Myra. Bergman Ramos (1970)
  • Giroux, Henry, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, Social Criticism (1991)
  • Hooks, Bell, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003)
  • Moten, Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013)

(POST)STRUCTURALISM/ POSTMODERNISM, EXPERIMENTAL WRITING PRACTICES

  • Jameson, Frederic, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (2017)
  • Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005)
  • Sharpe, Christina, ‘Black Annotation, Black Redaction’, from In the Wake (2017): pp.114-120.

GENDER THEORY

  • Benson, Josef, Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel (2014)
  • Halberstam, Jack, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020)
  • Preciado, Paul, Countersexual Manifesto, trans. Kevin Dunn (2018)
  • Rottenberg, Catherine, Performing Americanness: Race, Class and Gender in Modern African-American Literature (2008)
  • Weeks, Kathi, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

Key words search

Contemporary literature, Culture, Place, Politics, History, Identity, Environment,  Britain, North America, South Africa, Cornwall, twentieth-century literature, twenty-first-century literature, gender, sexuality, race, identity, nationality, Toni Morrison, Ali Smith, Coetzee, Calvino.

Credit value30
Module ECTS

15

Module pre-requisites

None

Module co-requisites

None

NQF level (module)

6

Available as distance learning?

No

Origin date

28/01/2021

Last revision date

24/02/2022