Undergraduate Literature In A World Context 2014-2015

This course aims to give students a grounding in those works of ancient Greek and Roman literature which were most important to and influential on the subsequent Western literary tradition. They will be encouraged to consider the development and implications of different forms and genres, introduced to different ways of thinking about the relation between literary form and historical context, and given the opportunity to develop their skills of literary analysis and critical argument.

This course explores literature as a global phenomenon, placing national literatures in an international context. It considers how literature engages with historical and cultural events during periods of rapid change and conflict, such as globalisation and decolonisation, and examines its relationship to other ways of making sense of the world (including the arts, philosophy and politics). It considers a range of examples, such as terrorism and problems of conflict and memory, in order to illustrate the role played by literature in coming to grips with events and social developments of world-wide importance. All literary texts will be read in translation.

When revolutions swept Europe in 1848, how did poets like Baudelaire, thinkers like Marx and Nietzsche respond? When the atom bomb dropped on 6th of August, 1945 and the planes hit the twin towers on September 11, 2001, how did writers bear witness to these traumatic historical events? How do writers, whether poets, novelists or philosophers, respond to world-historical events and how do they continue to shape our understanding of them today? In exploring these questions, this course will examine how the works of great writers and thinkers from around the world make and remake the worlds we live in. 

Why does Plato banish poets from his Republic?  Why does Dante damn lovers of literature to hell?  What is it about literature and the experience of reading that produces such terror and pleasure? These are only some of the questions we'll explore as we read great works of world literature, from the classical to the contemporary period, alongside fundamental literary thinkers. Works covered in the course may include Sophocle's Oedipus Rex, Dante's Inferno, Cervantes Don Quixote, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Murakami's 1Q84.

What makes the presence of bodies performing on stage a work of art? What plays out on stage and in the audiences' imagination when the auditorium lights dim and the curtain rises? What happens when the invisible divide between audience and performers is removed or when the performance leaves the auditorium and enters the street? These are some of the questions we will explore in relation to works of modern and contemporary theatre and performance art from around the world. 

This course provides students with the opportunity to pursue their own line of advanced research in consultation with advisers chosen from staff in Literature in a World Context. 

 

T.E. Hulme described art as spilt religion; Freud described art as sublimated sex.  Whether described in terms of the sacred, the sublime or the sexual, the powers of literature and art have long been associated with both the desire and the terror of losing ourselves in an encounter with the limits of our ability to shape, understand or master the world. From the sacred writings of ancient China to the feminist sublime of contemporary performance art, this course will explore ideas of the sacred, the sublime and of sexuality in relation to works of literature, film and visual art.