Approaches to Literary Genres

Learning Outcomes

Cognitive Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Critically evaluate both primary source materials and arguments in secondary texts
• Synthesize and integrate the analysis of primary sources and secondary texts in a coherent written argument
• Identify and analyse the shifting historical frameworks through which genre is understood
• Conceptualize historical and cultural issues in new ways as a result of close textual analysis

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Apply appropriate critical and historical approaches to different literary genres
• Describe and evaluate the state of research and scholarship on literary genres
• Identify and develop a topic for further research which might form the basis of an MA dissertation.
• Identify lines of enquiry about the relationship between literary genre and cultural change

Knowledge and Understanding

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

• Genres such as allegory, the bildungsroman, epic,the gothic, or romance
• Key questions raised by critical concepts, including: genre and subjectivity; gender, genre, and sexuality; genre, property and dispossession; genres of embodiment; genres of empire and decolonization; genres of race, extractivism, and affect; genres of the post-human
• What is at stake in the use, subversion and combination of literary genres
• How critical, cultural and scholarly material contributes to the ways we think about literary genres
• Specific issues raised by topics including: experiments with genre, the relationship between social change and formal innovation, the ethics and politics of representation
• Current key debates in genre studies
• How specific literary genres are used to make sense of wider historical, social, political, economic and technological transformations
• How to research and develop an appropriate topic on genre using sources from criticism and literary history

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Identify and outline the main debates in a given field
• Demonstrate the capacity for self-directed problem-solving and independent work within a strict time-frame
• Draw upon a range of relevant primary and secondary sources to explore specific historical and literary questions;

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Plan and write essays on the topic of genre in literary studies.
• Situate theories of genre within their respective intellectual and historical contexts.

This is an optional module for the MA in English Literary Studies, taught by those contributing to the programme in a given year, and will introduce you to the key critical, theoretical, historiographical and conceptual debates surrounding the study of genre. It will emphasise the issues which have been central to current scholarship on genre, and consider how literary and cultural texts have employed, combined, and subverted the formal conventions of particular genres.

Indicative topics include: horror and the gothic, the bildungsroman, allegory, romance, historical fiction, epic, satire, the picaresque, travel narratives, fantasy, science fiction. utopia, crime and detective fiction. These topics are studied across the English-speaking world, in Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, as well as Britain, Australia, and North America.

Preliminary Critical Reading:

Mary Chamberlain, ‎Paul Thompson _Narrative and Genre_

Jacques Derrida 'The Law of Genre'

Garin Dowd, ‎ Jeremy Strong, ‎ Lesley Stevenson, _Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism_

David Duff, _Modern Genre Theory_

John Frow, _Genre_

Fredric Jameson, _The Political Unconscious_

Teaching methods may include:

• seminars involving both tutor and student led discussion;
• use of internet and other electronic resources on studies in genre

Learning activities include:

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

The module will use primary materials related to the study of literary genres, 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, ecology, the history of art, the law, and political economy.

The module will explicitly raise questions about the uses of genres in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of genres.

An introductory session on critical approaches to genre will be followed by sessions on the following indicative topics: genre and subjectivity; gender, genre, and sexuality; genre, property and dispossession; genres of embodiment; genres of empire and decolonization; genres of race, extractivism, and affect; genres of the post-human. In the final weeks of the module 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.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.