Undergraduate Literature In A World Context 2015-2016

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.

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. 

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 examines a selection of the best and most exciting forms of literary modernism - from the novel, to poetry and drama, and from traditional, 'high-modernist' to experimental and avant-garde works. These literary works will be set against readings by representative thinkers of modernity, such as Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno. 

Authors studied may include: Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett.

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. 

 

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.