Approaches to the Long Twentieth Century (1914-Present)

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• specific issues raised by topics including: revolution, innovation, ekphrasis, medicine, interdisciplinarity
• the complex formal, stylistic, generic and aesthetic dimensions of twentieth-century texts and their relationship to debates surrounding the value and uses of literature;
• how critical, cultural, and scholarly material contributes to the ways we think about and respond to literature and culture in the long twentieth century;
• genres and movements such as modernism, avant-garde aesthetics, poetics, experimental drama,
• what is common and what is specific to the approach of different disciplines to the study of literature and culture in the long twentieth century;
• how to research and develop an appropriate interdisciplinary topic in the period using archival sources.
• key questions raised by critical concepts including: gender, race, class, science, imperialism and decolonization, capitalism, money/ finance, and globalization, environmental crisis, energy, affect, material culture and print culture across literary and historical disciplines;
• current key debates in twentieth-century studies;

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• identify and develop a topic for further research which might form the basis of an MA dissertation.
• describe and evaluate the state of research and scholarship on culture in cross-disciplinary perspective;
• apply appropriate critical and historical approaches to diverse cultural forms;
• identify lines of enquiry about cultural change common to historical and literary disciplines;

Cognitive Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• conceptualize historical and cultural issues in new ways as a result of interdisciplinary work.
• critically evaluate both primary source materials and arguments in secondary texts;
• identify and analyse the shifting historical frameworks through which culture is understood across the period;
• Synthesize and integrate the analysis of primary sources and secondary texts in a coherent written argument;

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• communicate a coherent and convincing argument at length in written form;
• draw upon a range of relevant primary and secondary sources to explore specific historical and literary questions;
• demonstrate the capacity for self-directed problem-solving and independent work within a strict time-frame.
• develop ideas in concert with others in the context of discussion and debate;
• Identify and outline the main debates in a given field;

This is the core module for the MA English Literary Studies (Twentieth-Century) pathway, taught by all those contributing to the MA in a given year, and will introduce you to the key critical, theoretical, historiographical and conceptual debates surrounding the study of the long twentieth century. It will emphasise the issues which have been central to the emergence and revision of key areas of scholarship on the period over the last quarter century, and to effective methods for research. The module looks at how twentieth-century literary and visual culture has responded to major social, technological, economic, scientific, and political transformations.

Indicative topics through which these will be addressed include: the emotions; the body; the literary marketplace; cultures of reading; global crisis; the age of decolonization; sexuality; terrorism and political violence; cultural production, authorship and literary celebrity; science, apocalypse and environmental crisis, and discourses of race; new modes of tragedy in twentieth-century drama; ekphrasis extended; writing for revolution; ‘forms of fiction now’; and race and innovation in twenty-first century poetics. These topics are studied across the English-speaking world, in Africa and South Asia as well as Britain, Australia and North America.

Teaching methods may include:

• seminars involving both tutor and student led discussion;
• use of internet and other electronic resources on the long twentieth century.

Learning activities include:

• participation in general discussion of themes drawn from weekly reading;
• oral seminar presentation;
• independent reading and research;
• development of archival skills;
• development of techniques and conventions of visual analysis.

The module will use primary materials from the period, e.g. literary texts, periodical literature, legal documents, fine art and popular visual images, artefacts etc. in relation to a wide range of secondary critical and historical texts drawn from literary criticism and its history, social history, the history of art, the law, and political economy. The module examines how far separate disciplines have been involved in a common debate about cultural change, and how far they have developed specialised accounts of such change.

The module will explicitly raise questions about the problems and possibilities of interdisciplinarity in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the conceptual and methodological issues involved in interdisciplinary study.

An introductory session on critical approaches to the period will be followed by sessions on the following indicative topics: subjectivity, memory, the archive, ‘the method wars’, contemporaneity, embodiment, decolonization, subjectivity, money and finance, catastrophe and the event, reading the world, and affect. In the final weeks of the course we will synthesize and review the work covered.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.