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Lecture List, 2018-19

 

Term 1

 

Week 1:  Introduction: Why Theory Matters (Prof. Paulo de Medeiros)  

 

Week 2: Unit 1
Nation, Culture, Place (lecturer for this unit: Dr. Mike Niblett)

Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)  

Week 3: Race and Language

Frantz Fanon, “The Negro and Language” (in Lodge, 127)  

Week 4: Form and Historical Materialism

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (in Lodge, 542)  

Week 5: Space, Politics, Narrative

Raymond Williams, from The Country and the City (in Lodge, 337)  

Week 6: Reading Week

Week 7: Unit 2
Ecocriticism (lecturers for this unit: Dr. Graeme Macdonald, , Dr. Mike Niblett, and Dr. Jonathan Skinner)

Ursula LeGuin, The Word for World Is Forest (1976)   
Excerpts from Lodge Reader: Raymond Williams, 'Country and the City' 337-47; Lawrence Buell, “Place” from The Environmental Imagination, 665-691.

Supplementary:
Lawrence Buell, “The Emergence of Environmental Criticism”, Chapter 1 of The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis”, from Glotfelty & Fromm (eds) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pps. xv-xxv.
Rob Nixon, Chapter One of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2011).

Week 8: Ecofeminism

Val Plumwood, excerpts from Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Introduction and Chapter 1, pages 1-41
Maria Mies, from Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 'Colonization and Housewifization', pages 74-111  

Week 9: Energy Humanities and Petroculture  

Patricia Yaeger, Imre Szeman et al “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale-Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA 126:2 (2011): 305-26.

Allan Stoekl, “Foreword” to Barrett and Worden (eds.), Oil Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, “The Rise of the Energy Humanities”, University Affairs, Feb 2014.

Italo Calvino, “The Petrol Pump" Numbers in the Dark and other stories (London: Penguin, 2009) 170-175.

China Miéville, “Covehithe”, published in The Guardian (22 April 2011). (Also available in Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories, Picador, 2016)

Week 10: Wilderness (Dr. Jonathan Skinner)  

The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced ageThe Guardian 29 August 2016.

Timothy Clark, “The Anthropocene – questions of definition,” Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015, 1-28.

Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” New York Times, 10 November, 2013.

Supplementary:
Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Ch 8: “Denial: A reading,” 159-174; Ch 9: “The tragedy that climate change is not ‘interesting’," 175-194.
Slavoj Žižek, “Avatar: Return of the Natives”, New Statesman, 4 March, 2010.

Term 2

Week 1: Unit 3
Art, Ideology, Criticism (lecturer for this unit: Professor Emma Mason)

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956) [Please note: the focus of this unit will be on 'Howl' specifically, but students are encouraged to read the other poems in the collection]   

Week 2:  Ideology

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from The German Ideology (in Lodge, 31)  

Week 3: Defamiliarization

Viktor Shklovsky, “Art, as Device” (1917), trans. Alexandra Berlina (2015)  

Week 4: Death of the Author

Michel Foucault, “What is an Author” and Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (in Lodge, 280, 313)  

 

Week 5: Writing Critically (Dr. Rochelle Sibley)  

Week 6: Reading Week

 

Week 7:  Unit 4 'One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?' (Lecturer for this unit: Professor Paulo de Medeiros)

Toni Morrison, A Mercy

Week 8: Edward Said,'Images of the Past, Pure and Impure', Culture and Imperialism, 1994. 15-20. Christina Sharpe, 'The Wake', Chapter 1 of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke UP, 2016. 1-24.

Week 9: Judith Butler, 'Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect', Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? 2009. 33-62.

Week 10 Jacques Derrida, 'In the Name of the Revolution, the Double Barricade (Impure "impure impure history of ghosts")', Specters of Marx, 1994. 95-124.