module specification

On this final year module The Novel and the Contemporary World, students will read a number of contemporary novels written in the period 1980 to 2010 by British and North American writers. All of the novels reflect on and encode in literary language and forms various aspects of post-Enlightenment (sometimes called postmodern) Western cultures. These aspects include: the nature and meaning of history; scientific versus poetic meaning; the world as enchantment and disenchantment; the nature of mediatisation, spectacle and alienation; power, morality and the genealogy of identity, and the political making of the modern world. On this module, and through discussion of the contexts provided by our chosen novels, we will discuss the meaning of modernity and postmodernity, and ask how modern we really are; we will consider the differences between fictional and historic narrative, the question of historical metafiction and the recovery of history; reflect on the significance of evocations of landscape, of landscape as character, and sacred and secular geographies; learn about the differences between scientific and literary-poetic languages and forms of knowledge; consider the differences between an ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ understanding of world and self; and reflect on a number of relevant philosophical ideas. The module will be taught in weekly sessions comprising a lecture and seminar and supported by online and face-to-face tutorial hours, and assessed by short critical writing and essays.

• The aims of this module are
• to introduce students to the contemporary (roughly the period 1980-2010) English and American novel and to their similar and differing characteristic themes;
• to provide students with a wide literary, aesthetic, historical and socio-cultural contextual repertoire for interpreting these fictions.
• to produce well-informed readers capable of thoughtful interpretation of many different kinds of cultural and social artefacts.

The module will be broadly divided into a discussion of British and North American fiction, equivalent to two 15 week modules, however discussion of comparative themes across the two national traditions will be encouraged. Topics in social, political and cultural history will also form part of the discussion, in a way that continues and develops the discussion in the earlier English Literature core modules Romantics to Victorians and Victorians to Moderns, such as: history and modernisation; the creative imagination, materialism and religion; mass warfare and generational trauma; Enlightenment, disenchantment and re-enchantment; technology, consumerism and alienation; ecology, nature and naturalism; moral and natural law, liberalism and identity politics; and the legacy of slavery and immigration.

British novels in order of study:

Graham Swift, Waterland (1983)
A.S. Byatt, Angels & Insects (1992)
Ian McEwan, Black Dogs (1992)
Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain (1997)

North American novels in order of study:

Don DeLillo White Noise (1985)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)
Toni Morrison A Mercy (2008)

Novels may change from year to year.

Use will be made of the www and Blackboard postings to direct students to relevant material that arises in lectures and seminars. Both lectures and seminars will strive to maintain a high level of dialogic engagement and interaction, and tutorial hours will support and develop classroom learning. Class sessions may also be enhanced by guest speakers, visits, screenings and other activities.

• On successful completion of this module students will be able to:

• reflect critically on the ways in which aesthetic meanings are built
• reflect critically on their own processes of reading and interpreting texts
• evaluate the contextual nature of semiotic meaning-production
o in terms of wider historical context
o in terms of the aesthetic and mythic cultural-historical context
o in terms of the diegesis (fictional world) itself

Assignment 1: a 1000 word draft of an argument anticipating essay 2, including student’s reading notes for one novel studied on the module, plus submission of reading notes for two pieces of relevant critical and/or historical and/or philosophical writing (20%)
Assignment 2: a 2000 word essay using material researched in assignment 1 and 500 words of independent critical reflection and summary material on a second novel (30%)
Assignment 3: a 3000 word essay covering one or two novels studied between weeks 16 and 30 (50%)

Assessment total = 7000 words

Acheson, James and Sarah Ross, The contemporary British novel, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005).
Brauner, David, Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
Connor, Steven, The English Novel in History: 1950-1995, (London: Routledge, 1995).
Conroy, Mark, Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity, (Columbus, O.H: Ohio U.P. 2004).
D’haen, T. & Bertens, H. (eds.), British Postmodern Fiction, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993).
Durante, Keith, The Dialectic of Self and Story: Reading and Storytelling in Contemporary American Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Head, Dominic, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000, (Cambridge: CUP, 2002).
Jarvis, Brian, Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (New York: St Martins, 1998).
Lane, Richard et al, Contemporary British Fiction, (Oxford: Polity, 2003).
Luckhurst, R. & Marks, P. (eds.), Literature and the Contemporary, (Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education, 1999).
Parrish, Timothy, From The Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction, (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).
Rennison, Nick, Contemporary British Novelists, (London: Routledge, 2005).
Stevens, David, The World Rises Again: Rereading the Frontier in American Fiction (Columbus O.H: Ohio University Press, 2002)
Tew, Philip, The contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004)
Wheeler, Wendy, ‘’The Biosemiotic Turn: Abduction, or, The Nature of Creative Reason in Nature and Culture’, Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, eds. A. Goodbody and K. Rigby, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Wheeler, Wendy, The Whole Creature: complexity, biosemiotics and the evolution of culture, (London : Lawrence & Wishart, 2006).