Important dates 2012-13 autumn term monday 1 October

NON FICTION WORKSHOP

Autumn Term, Weeks 1-10, Thursday 4-7 (The Writer’s Room, Millburn House)

MEMOIR (AND NOVEL)

Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life (pp 3-8), In Pharaoh’s Army (pp 171-181)

Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (pp 1-11)
2 Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (pp 7-13)

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (pp 3-22)

Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (pp 11-19)
PERSONAL ESSAY (AND INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM)

3 Begin workshop of student work (2 or 3 manuscripts per week)

Aristotle, “The Kinds of Friendship” (online link)

Seneca, “On Noise” (pp. 3-8)

Michel De Montaigne, “On affectionate relationships,” “On sleep,” (pp 205-210, 303-305), introductory note (online link), “Of books” (online link), “Of thumbs” (online link)

Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” (online link)

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (online link)

Jamaica Kincaid, “On Seeing England for the First Time” (pp. 333-344)
5 Ann Hodgman, “No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch” (pp. 157-162)

Philip Weiss, “How To Get Out of a Locked Trunk” (pp. 150-156)

Gary Taubes, “Is Sugar Toxic?”

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE WRITING (AND ‘LITERARY JOURNALISM’)

7 Intro to Travel Writing by Jamaica Kincaid (Best American TW 2005)

Frances Mayes, Under The Tuscan Sun (pp 1-25)

Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence (pp 3-25)

Kira Salak, “The Vision Seekers”

Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm (pp XI-11 and 136-146)
NATURE WRITING

9 William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (online link)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Nightingale,” “Dejection: An Ode” (online links)

Henry David Thoreau, “Solitude” (online link)

Gretel Ehrlich, “The Solace of Open Spaces” (pp 467-476) and “The Source of a River” (pp 208-211)

Pam Houston, “A Blizzard under Blue Sky” (pp 37-43)

Aristotle, “The Kinds of Friendship”

Baldwin, James “Notes of a Native Son”

Blake, William, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “The Nightingale,” “Dejection: An Ode”

Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Ehrlich, Gretel, “The Solace of Open Spaces” and “The Source of a River”

Hessler, Peter, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

Hodgman, Ann, “No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch”

Houston, Pam, “A Blizzard under Blue Sky”

Hurston, Zora Neale, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

Junger, Sebastian, The Perfect Storm

Kincaid, Jamaica“On Seeing England for the First Time”

Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior

Kinkaid, Jamaica, Intro to Travel Writing

Kolbert, Elizabeth, “The Darkening Sea”

Mayes, Frances, Under The Tuscan Sun

Mayle, Peter, A Year in Provence

McCourt, Frank Angela’s Ashes

Montaigne, “On affectionate relationships,” “On sleep,” “Of books”, “Of thumbs”

Proulx, Annie, The Shipping News

Robinson, Marilynne, Housekeeping

Salak, Kira, “The Vision Seekers”

Seneca, “On Noise”

St. Augustine, Confessions

Swift, Jonathan, “A Modest Proposal”

Taubes, Gary, “Is Sugar Toxic?”

Thoreau, Henry Taylor, “Solitude”

Weiss, Phillip, “How To Get Out of a Locked Trunk”

Wolff, Tobias, This Boy’s Life, In Pharaoh’s Army

10 000 words (8000 creative and a 2000-word critical essay)

The focus of the course will be on the historical development of these institutions and the literary works created around and about these institutions will form a central analytical strand within the course. The course does not require the participants to have studied history before, but will utilise certain historical skills such as reading and analysing documents and sources, working with evidence, and becoming familiar with certain conceptual frameworks and methodologies. These skills will be developed on the course with the support of the module leader. Each session will begin with a short lecture on the theme noted in the course outline and will then proceed to discuss the documents, literary works and secondary reading.

And this the primary reading: 

Workhouses 

Suzanne Day, The Amazing Philanthropists (1916). A copy of this text will be made available to everyone.

Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. Howard Eiland et al. Harvard UP, 2006

Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent (World's Classics)

Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems (Faber)

James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Declan Kiberd. Annotated Students' Edition if possible (Penguin, 1992).

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (World's Classics)

Jean Rhys, Good Morning Midnight (Penguin, 1969)


Selected Background Reading
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (Verso, 1983)

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (MIT Press, 1989)

Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Picador, 1996)

Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis (Polity, 1995)

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993)

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989)

Michael C Jay and Ann Chalmers Watts, eds., Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City (Rutgers University Press, 1981)

Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Macmillan, 1990)

Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995)

Edward Timms and David Kelley, eds., Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (Manchester University Press, 1985)

Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, (Verso, 1989)
A more detailed thematic reading list and week-by-week course outline will be provided in Week 1.


Poetry and Music – Dr Emma Mason/Peter Blegvad

This module seeks to bring together thinking about ‘poetry’ and ‘music’ from the fields of literary studies, musicology and philosophy in order to invite students to explore questions of form, creativity and the listening experience. The module suggests that the reading of poetic form and the listening experience music provides enable a reciprocal theorizing that opens up questions of how we represent and learn to interpret speech. As Henry Lanz writes in The Physical Basis of Rime (1927): ‘Though we are unable to represent exactly, still less play, the music contained in the vowels of our speech, the music nevertheless is there and in very definite form. It is a very strange music, which reminds one of those fantastic sounds, probably suggested by one’s own imagination, which one may occasionally hear in a moving railroad car when one listens intently to the monotonous noise of the rolling wheels.’ The module is taught through a series of key examples from the major innovations in poetry and music between 1700-2000: examples include the ballad tradition; love songs; the Beats; rhythm and blues; the philosophy of music; folk music; ‘silence’; and karaoke. Students on the MA in Writing must submit a portfolio of 30% creative work and 70% essay; students on the MA in English Literature, World Literatures, Philosophy and Literature or Pan-Romanticisms may choose to submit a portfolio of 40% creative work and 60% essay, or a 100% essay.
Primary texts
In addition to material handed out in seminars, primary texts include:
Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music (2002)

T. S. Eliot, The Music of Poetry (1942)

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis (2004)

Garcia Lorca, The Theory and Play of Duende (1928)

Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (2007)

Denis De Rougemont, Love in the Western World (1956)

Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Toward a Philosophy of Sound Art (2010)

Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician (1973)

Tim Brennan, Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (2008)

Nick Cave, Love Song Lecture (2000)

Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky (2011)

William Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease (2009)

Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (2010)

Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime (1927)

Luigi Russolo, 'The Art of Noises' (1913)

Eric Sackheim, The Blues Line: Blues Lyrics from "Leadbelly" to "Muddy Waters" (2003)

George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (1910)

R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977)

John Thompson, The Founding of English Meter (1961)

Phyllis Weliver, The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (2005)

Poetry & Poetics (Foundation Module) – Mr Peter Larkin
This module is the foundation core of the Poetry & Poetics pathway, although it may be taken as a stand-alone option. It introduces students to key questions about poetry, poetics and prosody from the Romantic period to the present day, working through the various methodologies that have arisen from these debates. Seminars address both theories of poetry as well as a selection of poetry by example poets that provide a focus for our discussion. Poets discussed include: William Wordsworth; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Edgar Allan Poe; Elizabeth Bishop; Rainer Maris Rilke; T.S.Eliot; Jorie Graham; Robert Frost; and W.S. Merwin. Example critical texts include: William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’, to Poems, 1815; Arthur Hallam, ‘On Some Characteristics of Modern Poetry’; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Rationale of Verse’ and ‘The Poetics Principle’; Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet; T.S.Eliot, The Sacred Wood; Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Writing Poetry is an Unnatural Act’; Martin Heidegger, ‘What are Poets for?’; Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening; and Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis. A full module description is available online, and most texts will be provided in electronic format on the module page shortly before term begins.

Postcolonial Theory – Dr Sorcha Gunne (Term 2)
This module is designed to offer an introduction to advanced study in the field of postcolonial studies, with an emphasis on literature. Assuming some familiarity (however limited) with some of the best-known works in the ‘postcolonial’ literary corpus (e.g., Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Edward W. Said’s critical writings) it aims:
i. to give students both a broad understanding of, and a stake or investment in current key conceptual, theoretical and methodological debates in the postcolonial studies field

ii. to situate these debates institutionally, by thinking about them in relation to developments in academic work in fields and disciplines (e.g. history, anthropology, philosophy) that abut and influence postcolonial literary studies;

iii. to contextualise the emergence and defining trajectories of postcolonial literary studies relative to wider social, political and intellectual developments – from the ‘Bandung’ era to the end of the Cold War to ‘9/11’ and the invasion of Iraq.

The module will proceed through an interpolation (and sometimes pairing) of literary and ‘theoretical’ texts. Students should come to the module prepared to read quite extensively and widely.

 

Locating the Field

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (1967)

Barbara Harlow, ‘The Theoretical-historical Context’ from Resistance Literature (1987)

Frantz Fanon, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ from The Wretched of the Earth (1965)

Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (1996)

 

Proposed Texts:

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps
Assia Djebar, Fantasia
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood
*Articles on Reserve
EN963 Petrofiction

(Resource Fictions: Studies in World Literature) - Dr Graeme Macdonald
Spring 2013 Tuesday 5:00-7:00
‘Oil is our God…we all worship Petroleum’ A Crude Awakening
This module studies the world literature of energy and natural resources. In 2011/12, it will analyse works about that most pertinent of planetary resources: oil. Our lives are saturated in oil – it is the most significant resource of the modern capitalist world system. It is everywhere, especially in those places where it appears invisible, scarce, or undiscovered. It determines how and where we live, move, work and play; what we eat, wear, consume. It is heavily invested in the shaping of our political and physical landscapes. To think about oil is not solely to think about automobiles or derricks or spectacular spills or barrel prices. The computer or the phone (or even the paper!) on which you are reading this blurb could not be made without this mineral. Oil’s universality makes it as controversial as it is ubiquitous in its apparent vitality and necessity. Modern culture is a Hydrocarbon culture.

The course will study fiction (and cinema and documentary) with oil at its core from across the world. Reading this ‘petrofiction’ reveals connected international patterns in literary form and theme; patterns that confirm the effectiveness of a recently reconfigured world literature as a method and a resource to map and critique the way in which the world’s resources are unevenly produced, refined, extracted and exploited on a global-local scale. You will see how Petrofiction reveals vulnerable populations around the globe subject to corporate and state oil imperialism. We will also fashion an ecocritical frame to view texts registering oil’s relations with ecological crisis, war, urbanisation, and campaigns for environmental justice. In tracking the development of cultural and political responses to oil production and use throughout the twentieth century, the course will maintain a focus on speculative forms of energy futures – and demonstrate why fiction offers a novel way to think about ‘peak oil’.

Upton Sinclair, Oil! USA, 1927

Ralph de Boissière, Crown Jewel, Trinidad, 1957

George Mackay Brown, Greenvoe, Scotland, 1972

Ken Saro-Wiwa, Selections from stories and essays, A Forest of Flowers, Nigeria, 1985

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, Martinique, 1992

Abdalrahman Munif, Cities of Salt (vol 1.), Saudi Arabia, 1985

Nawal El-Saadawi, Love in the Kingdom of Oil, Egypt, 2001

Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934) (Penguin, 2000 )

Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985) (Picador, 1986)

Ivan Vladisavic, Portrait with Keys: the City of Johannesburg Unlocked (1986) (Portobello Books, 2007)