MA Issues in Modern Culture Reading List 2021-2022
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MA Issues in Modern Culture Reading List 2021-2022
Note: the following document is divided by autumn and spring terms; included are
the reading lists for the two autumn term strands of Modern Literature and Culture
(Modernisms; The Contemporary); Critical Contexts; the two spring term strands of
Modern Literature and Culture (Experiments in Form; Popular and Visual Cultures);
the Options seminars for the first and second halves of the spring term.
Please note that these readings are provisional and subject to change. Be sure to check
Moodle and be attentive to emails from the course convener and the individual
seminar leaders for the most up-to-date reading lists.
AUTUMN TERM
Modern Literature and Culture Strand #1.1: Modernisms
1. Experiments in Point-of-View: Henry James
Professor Phil Horne
Required:
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
Further 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.
Philip Horne. ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters (Penguin, 1999)2
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.
2. Significant Form: Woolf, Fry, and Post-Impressionism
Dr. Benjamin Dawson
Required:
Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday (1921)* in Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction
of Virginia Woolf (ed.) Susan Dick (London: Harcourt, second edition 1989) or The
Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction (ed.) David Bradshaw (Oxford: OUP, 2008)
Desmond MacCarthy, ‘The Post-Impressionists’ (1910) [pdf]
Clive Bell, ‘The Artistic Problem’ (1914) [pdf]
Roger Fry, ‘A Retrospect’ in Vision and Design (1920) [pdf]
Paintings from the exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (Cézanne, Van
Gogh, et al.), plus Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.
* ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’, ‘An Unwritten Novel’, ‘A Haunted House’,
‘A Society’, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, ‘The String Quartet’, and ‘Blue & Green’.
Optional:
Virginia Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’ (1928) [pdf on Moodle]3
Criticism:
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf & the Bloomsbury Avant Garde: War, Civilization,
Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Gillespie, Diane. The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa
Bell. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988.
Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and
the Politics of the Visual. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Hintikka, Jaakko, ‘Virginia Woolf and Our Knowledge of the External World’, The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38 (1979), 5-14.
Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell,
Photography and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.
-----. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2010.
Johnstone, J. K. The Bloomsbury Group: E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey.
Noonday Press, 1954
Rosenbaum. S. P. ed. The Bloomsbury Group: A collection of Memoirs & Commentaries. Rev.
Toronto Press, 1995.
Rosner, Victoria, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group. NY: Cambridge
UP, 2014.
Sellers, Susan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2010.
Shone, Richard, ed. The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant. Tate
Gallery, Princeton UP, 1999.
Southworth, Helen (ed.), Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of
Modernism. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. LA: Univ of California Press, 1980.
3. Anticolonial Modernisms: Yeats and Tagore4
Dr. Lara Choksey
Required:
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (supplied as pdfs)
W. E. B. Yeats, The Tower (selected poems) and “The Fisherman”
Further Reading:
Michael Collins, “Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Friendship.” South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, 35:1, 118-142 (2012).
Declan Kiburd, “Childhood and Ireland” in: Inventing Ireland (1995)
David Lloyd, “The Poetics of Politics: Yeats and the Founding of the
State” in: Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post Colonial Moment (1993)
Jahan Ramazani, “Is Yeats a Postcolonial
Poet?” New Brunswick Vol. 17, Iss. 3, (1998)
Edward Said, “Yeats and Decolonisation” in: Culture and Imperialism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Introduction.” In: Readings (2014)
Aarthi Vadde, “Autotranslations: Rabindranath Tagore’s Internationalism in
Circulation.” In: Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914-
2016 (2017)
4. Modernist Bodies: Joyce’s Ulysses
Dr Julia Jordan & Dr Dennis Duncan
Required:
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 be5 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. 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). Clare Hutton, Serial Encounters: Ulysses in the Little Review (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 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). Vike Plock, 'Bodies', The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 184-199. Carrie J Preston, 'Joyce's Reading Bodies and the Kinesthetics of the Modernist Novel', Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 232-254.
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5. Modernist Nature: D.H. Lawrence
Dr. Hugh Stevens
Required:
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)
6. Our Modern Experiment: Eliot, Pound, and the Making of The Waste
Land
Professor Mark Ford
Required:
The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript edited by Valerie Eliot (1971)
The Poems of T.S. Eliot: An Annotated Edition: Volume 1 edited by Christopher Ricks and
Jim McCue (2015) (particularly their ‘Composite’ edition and notes to the poem itself)
Further Reading:
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)7 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) Crawford, Robert Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land (2015) 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) --- The Annotated Waste Land and T.S. Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (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)
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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)
7. African American Uncanny: Ralph Ellison
Dr David Isaacs
Required:
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Penguin, 1952)
Recommended:
Ralph Ellison, ‘Change and Joke and Slip the Yoke’ in The Collected Essays of Ralph
Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (Modern Library, 2003)
Ralph Ellison, ‘The Little Man at Cheehaw Station’ in The Collected Essays of Ralph
Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (Modern Library, 2003)
Sianne Ngai, ‘animatedness’ in Ugly Feelings (London: Harvard University Press, 2007)
Further Reading:
Adam Bradly, Ralph Ellison in Progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the
Shooting (Yale University Press, 2012)
John F. Callahan, ed., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook (Oxford University
Press, 2004)
Paul Devlin, ed., Ralph Ellison in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (Modern
Library, 2003)
Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth (Penguin, 1999)
Michael Germana, Ralph Ellison: Temporal Technologist (Oxford University Press, 2017)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2008)9
T.V. Reed, ‘Invisible Movements, Black Powers: Double Vision and Trickster Politics
in Invisible Man’ in Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of
American Social Movements (University of California Press, 1992)
Sarah Wasserman, ‘Zoned Out: Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and Urban
Infrastructure’ in The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel(Minneapolies:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
8. Modernity and Colonialism: Frantz Fanon
Professor Matthew Beaumont
Required:
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (Penguin, 2021)
Further Reading:
Anthony C. Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 1998)
Nigel C. Gibson, ed., Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Legacy (Prometheus Books, 1999)
Nigel C. Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (Polity Press, 2003)
Peter Hudis, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015)
9. Formal Experiments: Alfred Hitchcock
Professor Phil Horne
Required:
Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Rear Window (1954)
Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Psycho (1960)10
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)11
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
10. Documentary and Cinematic Experiments: Humphrey Jennings
and Maya Deren
Professor Pete Swaab
Required:
Humphrey Jennings: Spare Time (1939); Words for Battle (1941); Listen to Britain (co-
director with Stewart McAllister, 1942); Fires Were Started (1943, a.k.a. I Was A Fireman)
Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943); At Land (1944); Divine Horsemen: The Living
Gods of Haiti (shot between 1947 and 1954, reconstruction released 1977)
Further viewing and reading:
Maya Deren: Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)12
Humphrey Jennings: London Can Take It! (1940, a.k.a. Britain Can Take It!); The Silent
Village (1943); A Diary for Timothy (1945); A Defeated People (1946)
Dir. Kevin McDonald: The Man Who Listened To Britain (2000)
Orson Welles: It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles (shot 1941,
released 1993)
Deren, Maya: Divine Horsemen: Living Gods of Haiti (1953; repr as The Voodoo Gods,
1975)
Deren, Maya: Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film, ed. Bruce McPherson (2005)
May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by over two hundred observers (1937, repr.
1987) (Jennings was one of the founders of the Mass-Observation project)
Jackson, Kevin (ed.). The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader (Carcanet, 1993)
Jackson, Kevin. Humphrey Jennings (Picador, 2004).
Leach, J., (1998) 'The Poetics of Propaganda Humphrey Jennings and 'Listen to
Britain' in Grant, B.K., and Sloniowski, J., (eds), Documenting the
Documentary, Wayne State University Press, Detroit.
Aldgate, A. and Richards, J., (2007). Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second
World War, I.B. Tauris, London
Walford, Michael:
https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/michaelwalford/entry/listen_to_britain/
Modern Literature and Culture Strand #1.2: The Contemporary
1. Diasporic Adaptation & Immigrant Authenticity: Maxine Hong
Kingston
Dr. Xine Yao
Required:13
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976)
Further Reading:
Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Claire Jean Kim, ‘The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.’ Politics & Society 27.1
(1999)
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority
2. Something is Happening Here: Bob Dylan
Professor Phil Horne & Professor Mark Ford
Required:
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)14
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)
3. Black Feminist Historicizing: Octavia Butler and Genealogies
Dr. Xine Yao
Required:
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)15
Shelley Streeby, Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making Through Science
Fiction and Activism
Mark Jerng, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction
4. Literary Form and the Internet: Patricia Lockwood and Jenny Offill
Dr Jamie Fenton
Required:
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2021)
Jenny Offill, Weather (2020; London: Granta, 2021)
Imogen West-Knights, ‘The rise of the internet novel’, Prospect Magazine, March 2021
Further Reading:
Tore Andersen and others, ed., ‘Modes of Reading’, special issue of Poetics Today, 42(2)
(summer 2021)
Dril, Dril Official “Mr. Ten Years” Anniversary Collection, 2018
N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific
Analysis’, Poetics Today, 25 (1) (spring 2004), 67-90
Patricia Lockwood, Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals (London: Penguin, 2017)
Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts (London: Fourth Estate, 2021)
Shy Scanlon, ‘What We’re Getting Wrong About So-Called Internet Literature’,
Literary Hub, June 2021
5. Living at the Edge of the Universe: Bill Manhire & New Zealand
Culture
Professor Pete Swaab16 ‘I live at the edge of the universe / like everybody else’ (Bill Manhire) Required: Bill Manhire, Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2014), Wow (Carcanet Press, 2020) Further Reading: (a) Bill Manhire Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2001) South Pacific (Carcanet Press, 1994) Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews (Victoria University Press, 2000) The Stories of Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press, 2015) Some Things to Place in a Coffin (Victoria University Press, 2017) Wow (Carcanet Press, 2020) ‘Introduction’ to Janet Frame, The Goose Bath: Poems, edited by Pamela Gordon, Denis Harold and Bill Manhire, with an introduction by Bill Manhire (Random House, NZ, 2006 and Vintage, USA, 2006) BM’s twitter feed @pacificraft is also well worth following. (b) New Zealand Poetry more widely The introductions to the 1960 and 1985 Penguins are a good place to get a sense of various histories of NZ poetry. See Penguin Book of New Zealand Poetry (1960) edited by Allen Curnow Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985) edited by Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen
17
See also An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English , eds Gregory O’Brien, Jenny
Bornholdt and Mark Williams (Oxford, 1997), and Twenty Contemporary New Zealand
Poets: An Anthology, edited by Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack (Carcanet Press,
2009).
There’s an excellent account of NZ’s cultural and other histories in Michael King’s
The Penguin History of New Zealand (Penguin, 2003).
Other key figures in the history of NZ poetry include preeminently Allen Curnow,
also James K. Baxter and Hone Tuwhare. Two of the major older contemporary poets
prolific in many genres are Vincent O’Sullivan and C.K. Stead. Other contemporaries
I especially recommend are Jenny Bornholdt (especially The Rocky Shore), James Brown
(Lemon and Floods Another Chamber) and Hera Lindsay Bird (Poems).
6. Graphic Queer Temporalities: Alison Bechdel and the Archive
Dr. Xine Yao
Required:
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Further Reading:
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
Hillary Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds
Lee Edelman, No Future
7. Jeff VanderMeer and the Weird Pastoral
Dr. Lara Choksey
Required:
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (2015)18
Alex Garland (dir.), Annihilation (2018)
Further Reading:
Claire Colebrook, “What is the Anthropo-Political?” in: Twilight of the Anthropocene
Idols (2016)
John Hegglund, “Unnatural Narratology and Weird Realism in
Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation” In: James, E. and Morel, E. (eds), Environment and
Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology (2020)
H. P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.” (1937)
Jason Moore, “From Object to Oikeios: Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-
Ecology.” In: Capitalism in the Web of Life (2013)
Benjamin Noys, “Horror Temporis,” Collapse IV: Concept Horror (2012)
Benjamin J. Robertson, None of this is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (2018)
Warwick Research Collective, “The Question of Peripheral Realism” in: Combined and
Uneven Development (2015)
8. Complicated Feelings: Claudia Rankine and Affect Theory
Dr. Xine Yao
Required:
Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014)
Further Reading:
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions
Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought”
Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn”
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings
9. Autofiction: Rachel Cusk
Dr. Matthew Sperling
Required:19
Rachel Cusk, Outline (Faber & Faber, 2014)
Further Reading:
Teju Cole, Open City (2011)
Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? (2013)
Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family: My Struggle 1 (2013)
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (2012)
Philip Sayers,. Authorship's Wake: Writing after the Death of the Author (2020)
10. Citation, Audience, and Blackness on Film: Steve McQueen’s
Small Axe
Dr. Clive Nwonka
Required:
Mangrove (Small Axe) (Dir Steve McQueen, 2020)
Critical Contexts: The City
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.)20 Required: 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)
21
Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: the (Feminine) Art of Walking in Cities (London: Chatto &
Windus, 2016)
2. Racializing the City
Dr. Xine Yao
Required:
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’ The Atlantic
Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
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
3. City Symphonies: Early Cinema and the City
Professor Matthew Beaumont
Required:
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)22
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)
4. Wireless Imagination
Dr. Dennis Duncan
Required:
Virginia Woolf, “Craftmanship”: available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcbY04JrMaU
Ministry of Information, “West Indies Calling” (1944): available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViGwxJloI70
Louis MacNeice, “The Dark Tower”: available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjVkmo1b_fo
Samuel Beckett, “All that Fall”: available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY22jmHAS5E
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. Art and the City: The New York School
Dr. Linda Freedman23 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.
24
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
6. Hollywood Fictions
Professor Phil Horne
Required:
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)
Sunset Boulevard (1950, dir. Billy Wilder)
Mulholland Drive (2001, dir. David Lynch)
Further Reading and Viewing
Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
Nicholas Ray, In a Lonely Place (1950)
Vincente Minnelli, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Joel & Ethan Coen, Barton Fink (1991)
David Lynch, Inland Empire (2006)25
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
David Lynch: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers), ed. Richard Barney
Mike Davis, ‘Sunshine and Noir’ in City of Quartz
Mike Davis, ‘The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles’, in Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles
and the Imagination of Disaster
Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life
7. Class and the City
Dr. Matthew Sperling
Required:
Zadie Smith, NW (Hamish Hamilton, 2012)
Ben Lerner, 10:04 (Granta, 2015)
Further Reading:
Gary Day, Class (The New Critical Idiom) (Routledge, 2001)
Lawrence Driscoll, Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature (Palgrave, 2011)
Writers For The 99%, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story Of An Action That Changed America
(Scribe Publications, 2012)
Hui Wang, ‘We Are Not Free to Choose: Class Determinism in Zadie Smith’s NW’,
Arcadia 51.2 (2016): 385-404.
8. Filming New York
Professor Phil Horne
Required:
Films by Martin Scorsese:
Taxi Driver (1976)
The King of Comedy (1983)26
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)27
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)
Paul Lopes, Art Rebels: Race, Class, and Gender in the Art of Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese
(Princeton University Press, 2019).
9. Queer Theory, Queer Politics, and the City
Dr. Hugh Stevens
Main text: the film Paris Is Burning (1990)
10. Psychogeography
Professor Matthew Beaumont
Required:
Iain Sinclair, The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City (2017)
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)
SPRING TERM28
Modern Literature and Culture Strand #2.1: Experiments in Form
1. Disintegrating Forms: Beckett’s Prose
Dr. Julia Jordan
Required:
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Further Reading:
Chris Ackerley and Stanley E. Gontarski, eds., The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett
(2004)
Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text (Davies Group, 2007)
_____. Beckett, Modernism, and the Material Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2014)
Dirk Van Hulle, ed., The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015) [This should be read in tandem, ideally, with the
1994 version edited by John Pilling.]
Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993)
Shane Weller, Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism (Cambridge University Press,
2021)
2. Automatic Writing: From Surrealism to AI
Dr. Dennis Duncan
Required:
André Breton and Philippe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields, trans. by Charlotte Mandell
(New York: New York Review Books, 2020).
Roald Dahl, ‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’, in Dahl, The Great Automatic
Grammatizator and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2001).
Raymond Queneau, One Hundred Million Million Poems [originally Cent mille milliards de
poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960)] trans. by John Crombie (Paris: Kickshaws, 1983), or
Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, trans. by Stanley Chapman in Harry Mathews and
Alastair Brotchie (eds), Oulipo Compendium (London: Atlas, 2005). These are both quite29
hard to track down, so if you can’t find them have a look instead at Bev Rowe’s online
version: http://www.bevrowe.info/Internet/Queneau/Queneau.html
Zach Scholl’, ‘For the Bristlecone Snag’, The Archive (2011): 32-33.
Further Reading
Dennis Duncan, ‘Surrealism’s Subject: Two Cohorts of the Oulipo, in The Oulipo and
Modern Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 76-99.
3. The 1960s Novel: Ann Quin
Dr. Julia Jordan
Required:
Ann Quin, Berg
Further Reading:
Alice Butler, ‘Ann Quin’s Nighttime Ink: A Postscript’, June 2013,
http://www.alicebutler.org.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2016/03/Butler_AnnQuin_Book.pdf
Brian Evenson and Joanna Howard, ‘Ann Quin’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 23:
2 (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003) 50–75.
Adam Guy, The Nouveau Roman and the Novel in Britain After Modernism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019)
Julia Jordan, Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2020).
Ann Quin, The Unmapped Country, ed. Jennifer Hodgson (London: & Other Stories,
2018)
Philip Stevick, ‘Voices in the Head: Style and Consciousness in the Work of Ann
Quin’, in Breaking the Sequence, Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, eds. (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) 231–239, 231.30
4. The Post-War Long Poem: Bunting, Hill, Oswald
Dr. Matthew Sperling
Required:
Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (1966)
Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns (1971)
Alice Oswald, Dart (2000)
Further Reading:
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)
Michael Thurston and Nigel Alderman, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
David Wheatley, Contemporary British Poetry (London: Palgrave, 2014)
5. Constrained Writing: Oulipo
Dr. Dennis Duncan
Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style, trans. by Barbara Wright (London: Oneworld,
2008).
George Perec, A Void, trans. by Gilbert Adair (London: Vintage, 2008).
Italo Calvino, ‘The Burning of the Abominable House’, in Calvino, Numbers in the Dark,
trans. by Tim Parks (London: Penguin 2009).
Further Reading
Dennis Duncan, The Oulipo and Modern Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2019).31
Italo Calvino, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, in The Uses of Literature: Essays, trans. by
Patrick Creagh (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), pp. 3-27.
Italo Calvino, ‘Prose and Anticombinatorics’, in Warron F. Motte (ed.), Oulipo: A
Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 143-
52.
Harry Mathew and Alastair Brotchie (eds), Oulipo Compendium (London: Atlas, 2005).
Ian Monk and Daniel Levin Becker (eds) All that is Evident is Suspect (San Francisco:
McSweeney’s, 2018).
Philip Terry (ed), The Penguin Book of Oulipo (London: Penguin 2020).
Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual, trans. by David Bellos (London: Vintage, 1996).
6. The poetics of Black music: Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey
Dr Hugh Foley
Required:
Amiri Baraka, SOS: Poems 1961-2013
Please focus on the following poems, which are mostly also available in the Amiri
Baraka Reader.
• The Bridge
• Hymn for Lanie Poo
• Black Dada Nihilismus
• Rhythm and Blues
• Three Modes of History and Culture
• Black Art
• Tone Poem
• Poem for Half White College Students32
• In the Tradition
Nathaniel Mackey, from Song of The Andoumboulou
This is one of Mackey’s two lifeworks; it is a long poetic sequence begun in the 1980s
and still continuing today. Please read the sections published in Eroded Witness (1985)
and Splay Anthem (2006). I will make these available.
nos. 16-25 of the sequence, as performed with musical accompaniment from Royal
Hartigan and Hafez Modirzadeh, are widely available online.
Further Reading
Amiri Baraka, ‘Jazz and the White Critic’, ‘The Changing Same’ (both available in
Black Music (1967)
Nathaniel Mackey, ‘The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka,
in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing, (1993)
‘Breath and Precarity’, in Poetics and Precarity (2018)
Fred Moten, ‘Aunt Hester’s Scream’ in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition (2003)
Simone White, Dear Angel of Death (2019)
Listening
It may also help to listen to some of the works of, for example, John Coltrane,
Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane,
Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra, to get a sense of the sounds of jazz.
Please note: some of Baraka’s poems contain quite shockingly antisemitic and
misogynistic statements, among other extreme expressions of hatred. We will discuss
this in the seminar. For those interested in the context of fraught Black Nationalist –
Jewish relations in the USA in the 1960s and 70s, see Baraka’s own ‘Confessions of A
Former Anti-Semite’, or James Baldwin’s essay ‘Negros are anti-Semitic because they
are antiwhite’. (The collection Black Antisemitism and Jewish Racism, in which that essay
is found, offers much further useful material.)
7. Aleatory Fiction: BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates33
Dr. Julia Jordan
Required:
B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates
Further Reading
Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant (London: Picador, 2004)
B. S. Johnson, Well Done God!, eds. Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan
(London: Picador, 2013)
Julia Jordan, Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2020).
Special Issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction, B. S. Johnson/ Jean Rhys Special Issue
(Summer, 1985)
Philip Tew and Glyn White, eds., Re-Reading B.S. Johnson (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007)
8. Artist’s Books: Tom Phillips
Dr. Matthew Sperling
Required:
Tom Phillips, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, sixth edition (Thames &
Hudson, 2016)
This is billed as the ‘Final Edition’ of the work Phillips has been engaged in since
1966. Feel free to consult any of the previous editions of the book, and to investigate
the iterations of the project in other media. Phillips’ website gives a good guide to the
different version of A Humument here, and provides a useful list of further reading
here.
9. Anatomies of Melancholy: W.G. Sebald
Professor Mark Ford34
Required:
The Emigrants (1992) and The Rings of Saturn (1995) by W.G. Sebald
Further Reading:
Blackler, Deane, Reading W.G. Sebald: Adventures in Disobedience (2007)
Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh eds. W.G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma (2006)
McCulloh, Mark, Understanding W.G. Sebald (2003)
Wolff, Lynn. L, W.G. Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics: Literature as Historiography (2014)
10. A Postcolonial Anagram: Kabe Wilson’s Of One Woman or So
Dr. Dennis Duncan
Required:
The primary text is Wilson’s novella/artwork Of One Woman or So (under the
pseudonym Olivia N’Gowfri), which can be accessed here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8lM9VPOJmsCdktvdlFJODBkM1E/view
You should also have read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (any edition is fine,
though Wilson worked from the Penguin Classics text).
Please could you also watch The Dreadlock Hoax here:
http://www.dreadlockhoax.co.uk/the-dreadlock-hoax (it will be useful to read the
text too as Wilson is speaking).
Further Reading:
Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Recycling Revolution: Re-mixing A Room of One’s Own and
Black Power in Kabe Wilson’s Performance, Installation, and Narrative Art’, in
Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art, ed. by
Susan Stanford Friedman (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 20-47.
Kabe Wilson interviewed by Malachi McIntosh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az0Pxa2y8aQ35
Modern Literature and Culture Strand #2.2: Popular & Visual
Cultures
1. Modernist Typography
Dr. Dennis Duncan
Required:
Beatrice Warde, ‘The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible’, in An Approach
to Typography (New York: World, 1956), pp. 11-17.
Herbert Spencer, Pioneers of Modern Typography (London: Lund Humphries, 2004).
The film Helvetica (2008, dir. Gary Hustwit) is available on YouTube and is a fun and
accessible intro to modern and post-modern typography.
Further Reading:
Sarah Hyndman, Why Fonts Matter (London: Virgin, 2016)
Ellen Lupton, Thinking With Type (New York: Princeton, 2010).
Paul McNeil, The Visual History of Type (London: Laurence King, 2017).
Petra Eisele, Annette Ludwig, Isabel Naegele (eds), Futura: The Typeface (London:
Laurence King, 2017).
2. Langston Hughes and the Blues
Dr Matthew Holman
Required:
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes edited by Arnold Rampersad (1995)
Further Reading:
Baker, Jr. Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1987.36
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, Kristin. ‘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.
Ramazani, Jahan, Poetry of Mourning (U. Chicago Press, 1994 - chapter on Hughes, pp.
135-175)
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.
3. Cinematic Melodrama: Rainer Werner Fassbiner, Ali: Fear Eats the
Soul (1974)
Dr. Hugh Stevens
Required:
Rainer Werner Fassbiner, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)37
Further viewing:
Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows (1956)
Todd Haynes, Far From Heaven (2002)
Further Reading:
Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (1996)
Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s
Film (1987)
Brigitte Peucker, ed., A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (2012), especially Chapter
25, Elena Gorfinkel, ‘Impossible, Impolitic: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Fassbinder’s
Asynchronous Bodies’
Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius (1997)
4. Colour, Snaps, and Surface: Sylvia Plath
Dr. Linda Freedman
Required:
Collected Poems (Faber 1981)
Further Reading:
The Bell Jar (1966)
Journals 1950-1962 ed. Karen v Kukil (2000)
Letters Home: correspondence 1950-1963 ed. Aurelia Plath (1977)
Birthday Letters ed. Ted Hughes (1998)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and other prose writings (1979)
Secondary Texts:
Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989)
Jaqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991)38
Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman (1994)
Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002)
Sylvia Plath edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (1989)
Christina Britzolakis, Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (1999)
The Unravelling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath ed. By Anita Helle (2007)
Linda Freedman, ‘Plath and the ‘blessed, glossy New Yorker’ in Writing for the New
Yorker ed. Fiona Green (2015)
Marta Figlerowicz, ‘Thresholds: Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath’, Spaces of Feeling:
Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature (Cornell University Press, 2017), pp.20-43.
5. Complex Seeing: Race, Space, and the American City
Dr. Clive Nwonka
Required:
Paterson (Dir Jim Jarmusch, 2016)
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Dir Joe Talbot, 2019)
Key Reading:
William Carlos Williams, Book Two of Paterson (1948; 1963), pages 41–92.
Michael Boyce Gillespie (2016) Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black
Film. pp 157-161
Christina Sharpe (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham. Duke
University Press
Further Reading:
Dyer, R (1997) White. London: Routledge
Tonkiss, F. “The Ethics of Indifference: Community and Solitude in the
City.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 297–311.39
Bob Perelman, “William Carlos Williams”, in Alfred Bendixen and Stephen
[Stephanie] Burt (eds) The Cambridge History of American Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 557-582.
Paul Willemen, a two-page excerpt on "complex seeing" from Looks and Frictions:
Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomsbury, 1994), 141–143.
Vidal, B, Brown, T (2013) The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture
JT Welsch (2020) Poetry and Work: Some thoughts on Patterson (n) The Selling
and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry
Winters, J (2016) Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy and the Agony of
Progress. Duke
6. American New Wave: Loden and Cassavetes
Dr. Benjamin Dawson
Required:
Barbara Loden (dir.), Wanda (1970)
John Cassavetes (dir.), A Woman under the Influence (1974)
Further Viewing:
Arthur Penn (dir.), Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Peter Bogdanovich (dir.), The Last Picture Show (1970)
John Cassavetes (dir.), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
Terrence Malick (dir.), Badlands (1973)
Further Reading:
Carney, Raymond. American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American
Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
--------. The Films of John Cassavetes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.40
Elsaesser, T. et al. (eds.), The Last Great American Picture Show. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2004.
Léger, Nathalie. Suite for Barbara Loden. Trans. Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon. Les
Fugitives, 2015.
7. The Literary Thriller: Patricia Highsmith
Dr. Matthew Sperling
Required:
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)
Further Reading and Viewing:
Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950), The Price of Salt (1952; later re-issued as
Carol), Deep Water (1957), Those Who Walk Away (1967), Ripley Under Ground (1970),
Ripley’s Game (1974)
Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia
Highsmith (2009)
Film adaptations:
Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Strangers on a Train (1952); René Clément (dir.), Purple Noon
[Plein Soleil] (1960); Wim Wenders (dir.), The American Friend (1977); Anthony
Minghella (dir.), The Talented Mr Ripley (1999); Liliana Cavani (dir.), Ripley’s Game
(2002); Todd Haynes (dir.), Carol (2015)
8. Race, Culture, and Film Adaptation
Dr. Clive Nwonka
Required:
If Beale Street Could Talk (Dir Barry Jenkins, 2018)
Key Reading41
Baldwin, J (1974) If Beale Street Could Talk. Joseph
Friedman, R (2010) Enough Force to Shatter the Tale to Fragments. Ethics and
Textual Analysis in James Baldwin's Film Theory. ELH
Further Reading:
Baldwin, J (2000) The Devil Finds Work. An Essay. Delta
Hutcheon, L (2013) A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge.
Diawara, M (1993) Black American Cinema. Routledge
Crawford, M (2020) What is African American Literature? Wiley Blackwell
Schwarz, Bill. ‘A Star-Cross’d Nation: If Beale Street Could Talk, 2019’. James
Baldwin Review, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019.
Gillespie, M (2016) Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film
9. Rap, Hip-Hop, and the Founding Fathers: Lin Manual Miranda’s
Hamilton
Professor Mark Ford
Required:
Hamilton (available on Disney Plus and at the Victoria Palace Theatre)
Further Reading:
Chernow, Ron Alexander Hamilton (2004)
Miranda, Lin-Manuel Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton the Revolution (2016)
10. Long Form TV Drama: Succession
Dr. Matthew Sperling
Required:
Succession, created by Jesse Armstrong, season 1 (2018)42
In the UK, season 1 is available to stream on Now TV or Amazon Prime, or to buy
on DVD as Succession: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros./HBO).
Further Viewing and Reading:
Succession, season 2 (2019); season 3 (forthcoming, 2021)
Wheeler W. Dixon, Streaming: Movies, Media, and Instant Access (University Press of
Kentucky, 2013)
Ramon Lobato, Netflix Nations : The Geography of Digital Distribution (NYU Press, 2019)
Jorge Cotte, ‘Motion Sickness: Disavowing “Succession”’, Los Angeles Review of Books
(2019): https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/motion-sickness-disavowing-hbos-
succession/
OPTIONS SEMINARS
FIRST HALF OF TERM
11. Afrofutures
Dr Lara Choksey
A meeting place of tricksters and technoculture, ancestors and aliens, pharaohs and
geeks, broken cities and outer space, Afrofuturist aesthetics have shaped counter-
histories of Atlantic modernity since the late nineteenth century. This Option examines
how Afrofuturism’s ‘critical perspective’ (Nelson, 2002) unsettles the relationship
between artifice and authenticity in emancipatory politics when it comes to the
production of African diasporic community. Key figures in these movements have
often turned to speculative forms as technologies of reconstruction, and these forms
have in turn shaped theoretical writings on blackness and modernity. We will situate
Afrofuturism as an important cultural coordinate in a troubled constellation of
futurisms across the long twentieth century, including techno-utopianism, European
fascisms, the Communist International, postwar liberalisms, Pan-Africanism and
decolonisation. Foregrounding questions of genre, we will reflect on the process of
naming, defining and historicising an aesthetic trajectory formed by absences ofYou can also read
