Reading List: Digital Resources

Term 1

Week 1: Introduction to the module (Paulo de Medeiros)

Unit I: Narrative

*** Text to read over the summer for this unit, Anne Enright, The Gathering (2007)

Week 2: Karl Marx, excerpt from The German Ideology (1845) (Nick Lawrence)

Week 3: Sigmund Freud “The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream" (1899) and “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907) (Daniel Katz)

Week 4: Louis Althusser “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (excerpted)” (1970) and Fredric Jameson, “On Interpretation” (excerpted, The Political Unconscious (1-7 and 85-88) ([1981] 2002) (Paulo de Medeiros)

Week 5: Helene Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa" (1976) (Rashmi Varma) (and a visit from our subject librarian, Kate Courage)

 

Unit II: Poetics

Week 7: Comparative Poetry: Mahmood Darwish "Sonnet V"; W.B. Yeats "No Second Troy"; Lorna Goodison "Mother, the Great Stones Got To Move" Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, "Poetry as a Way of Saying," in Understanding Poetry (1938) (Jonathan Skinner)

Week 8: Poetry and Poetics: Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (excerpt, in digital format, E3-E22). Layli Long Soldier, “38” (from Whereas, Graywolf Press, 2017). Also available online: https://onbeing.org/poetry/38/ (additional poems to be distributed electronically). (Dan Katz)

Week 9 Contemporary Poetics I: Innovation and Contemporary Black Poetics

Jay Bernard, Surge (Chatto & Windus 2019)

Harryette Mullen, ‘Poetry and Identity’ in The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be (University of Alabama Press, 2012) pp.9-12 (available as ebook through Warwick Library) (Christine Okoth)

Week 10 Contemporary Poetics II: Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid (2010) and selected poems
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985) (Emma Mason)
[Note: for "A Cyborg Manifesto, please focus on the following sections. 1/ Page 8 (from "The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world') to page 10 ("Their fathers, after all, are inessential.") 2/ Page 33 (from "Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafing our bodies.") to page 34 ("The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C3 I, command-control-communication-intelligence, the military’s symbol for its operations theory.")]

 

Term 2

Unit III: Performance

*** Text to be read alongside material for weeks 1-3: Saadallah Wannous, Soiree for the 5th of June (1967)

Please see the overview of the play, "Critique After the 1967 Defeat" by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, that also provides an introduction to both the author’s work as well as the larger context (namely, the June 1967 war).

Week 1: Ric Knowles, "Chapter 2: Theatre" from How Theatre Means (2014) (Stephen Purcell)

Week 2: Antonin Artaud "The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto" in The Theatre and Its Double (1938) (Matt Franks)

Week 3: Augusto Boal, "Preface to the 1974 Edition" and "Poetics of the Oppressed" in Theatre of the Oppressed (1970) (Stephen Purcell)

Week 4: To read: Judith Butler "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" Theatre Journal (1988) and Nicole Rachelle Fleetwood ‘Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility’ in Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness, 105-145 (2011). To watch: Martha Rosler Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) (Paulo de Medeiros)

Week 5: Black Performance

Frantz Fanon "The Fact of Blackness" Black Skin White Masks (1952) (PDF extract from last year)

To listen to/watch: Kendrick Lamar, Alright (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-48u_uWMHY

To look at: Carrie Mae Weems "The Louisiana Project" (2003), Adrian Piper Mythic Being (1972-1975) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bly5tUZI1I andhttps://www.thomaserben.com/exhibitions/the-mythic-being/(Christine Okoth)

 

Unit IV: Image

Week 7 Photography: Selected images from Sophie Riestelhuber. Details of the World (2001) and WB: West Bank (2005). Selected Images from Ammal Said (http://www.amaalsaid.com/portraits/5b68h2wgnwzhnvbt8y3lisrqwr0b00). Susan Sontag. “In Plato’s Cave”from On Photography (1977), 1-26; and Marvin Heifermann. “Photography Changes Everything” in Photography Changes Everything (2012), 11-21. (Paulo de Medeiros)

Week 8 Spectacle: To watch: Xin Xin “Foxconn.tv” (excerpt, 2015) and ipod ads and ipod ads culturejammed
To read: Guy Debord "Separation Perfected" Society of the Spectacle (1967) (Caitlin Vandertop)

Week 9 Graphic: Richard McGuire, Here (1989). Andreas Malm, 'Introduction: Theory for the Warming Condition', The Progress of This Storm: on society and nature in a warming world (Verso, 2018). Roy Scranton, 'Introduction: Coming Home', Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: reflections on the end of a civilisation (City Lights Books 2015). David Farrier, 'Deep Time', The Atlantic October 31, 2016. (Graeme Macdonald)

Week 10 Film: Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. (dirs.). Bacurau. (2019). DVD. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim. “Situating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. 2006. 1-15. (Paulo de Medeiros)