EN2C7/EN3C7 Devolutionary British Fiction
Convenor: Professor Michael Gardiner
| DAY/TIME: | |
| TUES 11 - 12:30 | |
| TUES 12:30 - 14:00 | |
This module asks about at the foundational thinking of British union and empire, and how challenges to it have been culturally registered.
It reads post-1940 texts groups broadly in terms of a few key themes including: British mythologies, sub-British nationalities, immigration, constitutional crises, devolution (national or regional government), Brexit, and 2020s challenges. By the end there should be some familiarity with the broad historical parameters, and devolution of Britain's nations, devloution and independence campaigns, English regionalism, and the afterlives of empire. We will also touch on: ‘democratic deficit’ and its literary responses; post-war consensus and its futures and its links to Thatcherism; the form of parliamentary representation; defences of British values; postcolonial melancholia; place and embodiment; forms of violence; nuclear deterrence; the gestation of the English Literature canon; psychiatry and anti-psychiatry; psychogeography; language, dialect, and accent.
There is no requirement to have any specific A-Levels or school subject, for example in History or Politics. My advice would be to put school courses out of your mind. There is any need for specific knowledge; an interest in reading historically is helpful as it is on all modules, but ultimately you can consider this a 'post-1940 fiction' module if you like. There is an Extra Reading list which will be periodically updated, and which you are should look at before writing essays rather than starting with a blind search. Every week there will be a set text, which you are required to have looked at - you're strongly advised to buy paper books of each of these - and 'recommended' texts, which will help but are not compulsory. Not all recommended texts are linked below, but they should be in the library or easily available if they are not linked. These do not always perfectly aiign with the set text, some are staggered across weeks.
Note that there is no group of 'devolutionary' literary texts (and the module's name is inherited).
There is one seminar a week, for which you should be familiar with the set text and be ready to bring us some ideas about it. We will talk about the structure of the seminars, and other basics, in Week One. Please note that tutors won't be able to do 'catch-up' sessions. There are no lectures. There are no seminars in Term Three.
Assessment
Assessment is by two 4000 word essays or two 5000 word essays (see below). Write on one or more texts from the relevant term, plus anything else or nothing else. Students choose their own titles; you can get these titles looked at by the module tutor within term time, but don't have to.
Link to advice on essay writing is below.
Intermediate Years:
2 x 4000 word essays
Final Years:
2 x 5000 word essays
SYLLABUS 2023-24
1. Introduction, no preparation required
I. Consensus
2. SET: George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and ‘England, Your England’ (1941)
SUGGESTED:
Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945), widely available
Orwell, Essays (Penguin, any edition; choose any essays you're interested in)
Orwell, Orwell and England (essays) (Macmillan, 2020)
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul (1989)
Any historical account of the post-war consensus
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What does Orwell do with Britain's 'natural' or 'organic' authority?;
. What does this book, and his wartime writing, say about British progress?;
. Is Oceania the Anglosphere?; What's its relation to British empire?
. Is Orwell right about the power of nationalism? How about patriotism, and what's the difference?;
. What were the conditions of post-war Britain, and how do these feed into the novel?
3. SET: Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)
SUGGESTED:
dir. Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange (1971) (available on Box of Broadcasts)
Anthony Burgess, 1985 (1978)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. Why does the book have this set of concerns at this point in time?;
. Why is there so much Slavic language in the book?;
. Is the book's violence meaningless?;
. What does the environment and architecture of the book and film look like?;
. How does Kubrick's film update the themescape of the book?
. What was entryism and what would its futures be?
4. SET: Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
SUGGESTED:
Alan Sillitoe, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ (story) (1959)
dir. Tony Richardson, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (film) (1962)
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ (1886)
G.E. Davie, The Democratic Intellect (1961)
various essays in eds. Michael Gardiner and Willy Maley, The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (2013)
various essays in Textual Practice 32-9 (2018)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What are the differences between the Scottish and English education systems, and why do they matter?;
. What are the mid-twentieth century legacies of the Scottish universities and Oxbridge?;
. Why is Scottish writing sometimes described as 'schizophrenic'?;
. To what extent is this text poetic and connotative, and why might this matter?;
. How did the imperative to shared productivity play out in the post-war consensus?;
. What was 'time and motion study'?
5. SET: Raymond Williams, Border Country (1960)
SUGGESTED:
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)
Raymond Williams, Who Speaks for Wales? (2003) (here is one part of this but see contents, 1926 chapter, and Welsh fiction tradition chapters)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What is Wales's place in post-war Britain?;
. what is the significance of the Grammar School then Cambridge background?;
. How is the grammar school scholarship written large on the culture of the 1950s-60s?;
. how does the 1926 General Strike speak to post-war Britain?;
. what is nonconformism and how does it relate to Britishness?
II. Thatcherism, Ireland, the 'English Civil War'
7. SET: Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
SUGGESTED:
dir. Derek Jarman, Jubilee (1978)
Robert Moss, The Collapse of Democracy (1976), first chapter
John Rowe Townsend, Noah's Castle (1975)
dir. and wr. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set (1999)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What kinds of fear of British collapse existed in the mid-'70s?;
. What created the Conservative counter-revolution, and what was its legacy?
. What are the roles of inflation and, more widely, arithmetic value, in British belonging?
SUGGESTED:
dir. Mick Jackson, A Very British Coup (1988)
Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (1977)
Iain McLean, What's Wrong with the British Constitution? (2010)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. How is the British establishment unusually antifragile;
. Why is nuclear deterrence so important to Britain and the Anglosphere?;
. What is 'absolute parliamentary sovereignty', and how does it speak to the quandry of the 'British left'?;
. What does early '80s Labour bequeath to the twenty-first century?';
. Why did Jeremy Corbyn's Labour support a nuclear arsenal in 2019?
9. SET: David Peace, GB84 (2004)
SUGGESTED:
Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (1994)
dir. and wr. Bernard Jackson and Tony Wardle, The Battle for Orgreave (1986)
Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping (1971)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. How was policing 'miliarised' in the 1970s?;
. What was the prehistory of the 1984-85 Miners' Strike?;
. How do embodiment and belonging play out in the book?;
. How does parataxis relate to Britishness?
. Why was it important for Thatcherism to defeat trade unions?;
. How did British politics change after the fall of working-class trade unions?;
. What does the book say about press neutrality;
10. SET: dir. Steve McQueen, Hunger (2008)
SUGGESTED:
Timothy Shanahan, The Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Morality of Terrorism (2009)
Bobby Sands, One Day in My Life (1993)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What is the difference in status between the 'political' and the 'non-political' prisoner?;
. How does Catholicism relate to Britishness?;
. How is there a particular animosity between the IRA and Thatcherites?;
. How does the colour palette of the film work?; what about sound editing?;
. How does political protest change in 1970s-'80s Britain?
III. The Second Scottish Literary Renaissance
SUGGESTED:
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (1961)
Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel (1999)
Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (1992/ 2000), chapter 'Modernism as Provincialism'
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What is Scotland's problem with 'representation'?; is this something that extends beyond parliament?;
. what are the origins of the 1980s-90s Literary Renaissance;
. What are Lanark's cultural precedents?;
. Why does Gray have such an influence on millennial post-British thining?
12. SET: James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late (1994)
SUGGESTED:
James Kelman, And the Judges Said... (2002)
essays from ed. Scott Hames, The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (2010)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. How does dialect relate to cultural prestige?;
. What was 'the Booker Prize controversy'?;
. What are dialectical prose and Free Indirect Discourse?;
. How do the visual and the haptic play out in the book?;
. Does the book have a 'spiral' narrative?
13. SET: Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993)
SUGGESTED:
essays in ed. Berthold Schoene, The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: EUP, 2007)
dir. Danny Boyle, Trainspotting (1996)
Michael Gardiner, 'British Liberalism's Opiate Subjectivity' (2021)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What is the relationship between opiates, Britishness, and addiction?;
. How does the book parody Thatcherism?;
. How about the thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment?;
. Was the Literary Renaissance absorbed into millennial 'Cool Britannia'?
14. SET: Janice Galloway, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989)
SUGGESTED:
essays in Schoene, as above, and catchup
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What are the relations between place, nationa, and gender?;
. What is anti-psychiatry, and how to its core tenets play out here?;
. is James Kelman already showing an influence here?;
. Is there something about typographical experiment here that is particularly national?;
. Does the book sketch out possible links between fiction and depression?;
IV. Psychogeography, Melancholia, Nostalgia, Hauntology, Brexit
15. SET: J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island (1974)
SUGGESTED:
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Muriel Spark, Robinson (1958)
Iain Sinclair, London Orbital (2000)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. How does Britishness suggest a unification of space?;
. What are 'Robinsonades'?;
. What is psychogeography?;
. How is this book postcolonial?;
. What is the twentieth-century history of English walking?
17. SET: Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
SUGGESTED:
dir. Mick Jackson, Threads (1984)
Duncan Campbell, Secret Society: In Time of Crisis (documentary) (1987)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. How does the book make representation 'quantum'?;
. What has been Britain's relationship to nuclear weapons?;
. Why are 'cyclical histories' subversive of Britishness?
. Does this book have a 'folk language'?;
. Is this book a psychogeopgraphy?
18. SET: Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (2014)
SUGGESTED:
Katy Shaw, Hauntology (2020)
Grafton Tanner, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock (2021)
Mark Fisher, essays from K-Punk (2018)
Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah, text and introduction (2011)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. Is there a specifically British time?;
. What is the nostalgia industry, and is anything outside it?;
. What was neoliberalism's 'hell of the same'?;
. How did the Fisher-related commentary on hauntology force a reconsideration of time and progress?;
. What is Folk Horror?
19. SET: Fiona Mozley, Elmet (2017)
SUGGESTED:
Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem (2009)
dir. Mackenzie Crook, Detectorists (2014-2022)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What is the relationship between violence and solidarity?;
. What is Elmet?;
. Why is woodland so significant in potrayals of England?;
. Did a 'post-British primitive' emerge in the twenty-first century?;
. How does gender work in the book?
20. SET: dir. Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man (1973)
SUGGESTED:
Adam Scovell, Folk Horror (2017)
dir. Piers Haggard, The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)
WE COULD THINK ABOUT:
. What is the role of Folk Horror in delineating place- and time-specificity?;
. How do the Jacobite and the barbaric return in the film?;
. Does animism suggest a way out of 'empiricist empire'?;
. What has been British commercial empire's struggles with its peripheries?
EXTRA READING (LIST PROVISIONAL AND ONGOING)
I. Consensus
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006 (1983))
Alexander Broadie, The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: CUP, 2003)
Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Johnathan Cape, 1991)
Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Routledge, 2011)
G.E. Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Ednburgh: EUP, 2013 (1961))
William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism (London: Sage, 2014) (ebook is through Warwick library)
Daniel Defoe, History of the Union (any edition (1709)) (easily findable online)
David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation (London: Penguin, 2019)
Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (London: Palgrave 2013 (1978))
Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Winchester: Zer0, 2014)
Michael Gardiner, Time and Action in the Scottish Independence Referendum (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015)
Derek Jarman, wr and dir, Jubilee (1978): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4ao9nnn_p8
Derek Jarman, wr and dir, The Last of England (1988)
John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (any edition (1689))
Martin McQuillan, Theorising Muriel Spark (Bastingstoke: Palgrave, 2000)
Tom Maschler, Declaration (London: McKIbbon and Kee, 1957)
Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008)
Karel Reisz, dir, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association, 1999 (1991))
Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958/ any edition
Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1957/ any edition
various directors, Free Cinema (London: BFI, 2006 (1952-63)) (this is a DVD, but look at related BFI material, e.g. on their youtube channel)
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (any edition (1958)) (cf. Essential Writings 2014 - ebook is through Warwick library)
II. Thatcherism
Andy Beckett, Promised You a Miracle (Penguin, 2016)
William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism (Sage, 2014)
Andrew Gamble, The Strong Economy and the Free State (1988)
Michael Gardiner, 'Eco-Catastrophe, arithmetic patriotism, and the Thatcherite promise of nature', 2018
R. Hefferman, New Labour and Thatcherism (2000)
Institute for Economic Affairs back catalogue
John Medhurst, That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76 (Winchester: Zero, 2014)
The Miners' Campaign Tapes DVD (2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LLzNdtf13s&list=PLNDns19Vyd0LoykMibDlcud5RioRAIF8F
Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (London: Granta, 2000)
Jon Savage, England's Dreaming (London: Faber and Faber, 2005 (1991))
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (any edition (1776))
Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s (London: Aurum, 2013 (2008))
III. The Second Scottish Literary Renaissance
Various essays in ed. James Acheson, The Contemporary British Novel (Edinburgh: EUP, 2005)
Timothy C. Baker, ‘Scottish Utopian Fiction and the Invocation of God’, Utopian Studies 21-1, 2010
Robert Boyers, Laing and Anti-Psychiatry (London: Penguin, 1973)
eds. Brown, Clancy, Manning, Pittock, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol 3 (Edinburgh: EUP, 2007)
Joseph Brooker, Literature After the 1980s: After the Watershed (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010)
David Cooper, The Language of Madness (1978)
Cairns Craig, 'Resisting Arrest: James Kelman', in eds. Randall and Wallace, The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies (Edinburgh: EUP, 1993)
Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996)
Cairns Craig, ‘1979, Edinburgh and Glasgow: Devolution Deferred’, in ed. Randall Stevenson, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century Literatures in English (Edinburgh: EUP, 2006)
Cairns Craig, ed. The History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 4, The Twentieth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1987)
Robert Crawford, Scotland's Books (2007)
Owen Dudley Edwards, A Claim of Right for Scotland (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989)
Michael Gardiner, ‘British Territory: Irvine Welsh in English and Japanese’, Textual Practice 17-1, 2001
Felix Guattari, 'The Divided Laing' in ed. Gary Genosko, The Guattari Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 (1970))
Various essays in ed. Scott Hames, The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010)
Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707 to the Present (Routledge, 2004 (1977))
Gerry Hassan, The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power (Edinburgh: EUP, 2009) (ebook is through Warwick library)
Franz Kafka, The Trial, 1925
Michael Keating, Nations Against the State (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001 (1996))
James Kelman, A Chancer (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009 (1985))
James Kelman, The Good Times (Secker and Warburg, 1998)
Simon Kovesi, James Kelman (Manchester: MUP, 2007)
David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: Sociology of a Stateless Nation (any edition (1989))
Iain McLean, What's Wrong With the British Constitution? (Oxford: OUP, 2010)
Gavin Miller, ‘Literary Narrative as Sociology in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut and Alasdair Gray’, Journal of Narrative Theory 31-3, 2001
Gavin Miller, Alasdair Gray: the Fiction of Communion (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005)
Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: EUP, 2004)
Alan Riach, Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture, and Iconography (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005)
ed. Alan Riach, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: EUP, 2009)
Essays in Berthold Schoene, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010)
Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010 (1961))
David Torrance, 'We in Scotland': Thatcherism in a Cold Climate (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009)
Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: an introduction to language and society (London: Penguin, 2000 (1974))
IV. Psychogeography, Melancholia, Nostalgia, Hauntology, Brexit
Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness (Manchester: MUP, 2007)
J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (London: Fourth Estate, 2006)
Jeanette Baxter, J.G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum, 2009
Various essays in Nick Bentley et al. ed., The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)
G.K. Chesterton, The Secret People, 1908: http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/secret-people.html
Robert Colls, The Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2002/ 2009
Laura Colombino, Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013)
Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Pocket Essentials, 2010)
Merlin Covereley, Hauntology (Oldcastle, 2020)
Susan Condor, ‘Devolution and National Identity: The Rules of English (Dis)engagement’. Nations and Nationalism 16, 2010: 525-543
Michael Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989) (ebook is through Warwick library)
Matt Colquohon, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy, and Mark Fisher (London: Repeater, 2020)
ed. Robert Eaglestone, Brexit and Literature (London: Routledge, 2018)
Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003/ 2004)
Simon Featherstone, Englishness: Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity (Edinburgh: EUP, 2009)
Brian Finney, English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zero, 2009)
Mark Fisher, 'What is Hauntology?' Film Quaterly 66-1, 2012: https://fq.ucpress.edu/content/ucpfq/66/1/16.full.pdf
Mark Fisher, ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
Mark Fisher, 'The Weird and the Eerie' (Repeater, 2016)
Samuel Francis, The Psychological Fictions of J.G Ballard (London Bloomsbury 2013)
Michael Gardiner, The Return of England in English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012)
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules (London: Random House, 2015)
Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Routledge, 2002)
Robert Hazell, ed., The English Question (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006)
Howard Ingham, Jon Dear, et al., We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror (self-published, 2018)
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
Richard Littler, Discovering Scarfolk (Ebury, 2014)
Patrick Keiller, dir, Robinson in Ruins (2011)
Michael Kenny, The Politics of English Nationhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003/ 2010)
Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside (London: Little Toller Books 2010)
James Mitchell, ‘England and the Centre’, Regional Studies 36-7, 2002
H.V. Morton, In Search of England, 1927/ any edition
Paul Kingsnorth, Real England (London: Granta, 2009)
Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake (Unbound, 2015)
Lee Rozelle, ‘“I am the Island”: Dystopia and Ecocidal Imagination in Rushing to Paradise, Super-Cannes, and Concrete Island’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17-1, 2010
Harlan Wilson, J.G. Ballard (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017)
Mark Perryman, ed., Imagined Nation: England after Britain (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2008)
Iain Sinclair, Sorry Meniscus (London: Profile, 1999)
Ben Wheatley, dir., A Field in England, 2013
Simon Reynolds, Retromania (London: Faber, 2012)
J.B. Priestley, English Journey, 1934/ any edition
Ken Russell, dir, wr. Christopher Logue, Savage Messiah, 1972
Duncan Petrie, ‘Scottish Gothic and the Moving Image: A Tale of Two Traditions’, in ed. Carol Margaret Davison, Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: EUP, 2017)
Jonathan Rigby, English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015 (Cambridge: Signum, 2015)
James Rose, Beyond Hammer: British Horror Cinema Since 1970 (Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2009)
Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia (Winchester: Zer0, 2011) (ebook is through Warwick Library)
Ben Wellings, English Nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere (Manchester: MUP, 2019)
Hauntological music: Ghost Box label, Boards of Canada, Broadcast, Vaporwave and Hardvapor, Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro, Ikonika, Actress, Philip Jeck, Position Normal, ‘neo-’80s’ e.g. Drab Majesty, C21 postpunk revival, ‘New Retro’, Sovietwave (many youtube/ Spotify lists), Eastern European retro synth, Афина, ‘Ostalgie’ etc., '8-bit composition'...
The original Folk Horror triad: The Wicker Man and dir. Michael Reeves, Witchfinder General (1968) and dir. Piers Haggard, Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)
ASSESSMENT: Students make their own essay titles for this module. You can have your essay title, and broad idea, okayed by your seminar tutor - but you don't have to.
Remember that you only have to talk about one set text from the relevant term, though essays will sometimes work better with two set text; you can bring in any other texts that you think will be interesting in the discussion - 'A theme in B course text and C non-course text'. These texts do not have to be obviously literary.
Titles generally work best when simplest and most concrete, and usually dealing with one (or more) of the topics listed above. They will often take a simple form like 'Theme A in Text B and Text C', 'Theme A in Text B', 'Is Text A (provocative description)?', ' Text A relate to Text B in (historical scenario/ turning point)?'.
(Some very broad examples might be - note that you are advised not to choose these but to come up with your own): Term One: 'The Questioning of Post-War Consensus in BPR and BC'; 'How would we understand a "Third English Civil War"?'; 'The Imperative of Productivity in BPR'; 'In what ways does NEF question Britishness?'; 'Roots of Thatcherism in MS and GB84'; 'Did the UK irrecoverably decline in the 1970s?'; 'The import of "the troubles" from Northern Ireland to the mainland in GB84 and Hunger'; 'The growing sense of impotence of the Labour Party - MS and AVBC'; 'Was Jeremy Corbyn the next Harry Perkins?'; 'Educational traditions and the national question in BC and BPR'; 'Was Orwell anti-nationalist?'; Term Two: 'The issue of Scotland and representation in Lanark and HLIW'; 'What did the Kelman "Booker Prize controversy" suggest about Standard English and literary narration?'; 'To what extent is "English" really Scottish?'; 'Embodied experience in Trainspotting and TITKB'; 'The place of anti-psychiatry in the Scottish Literary Renaissance'; 'Writing and Memory in Lanark and TITKB'; 'Gender and Nation in TITKB'; 'Why the postcolonial Robinsonade?'; 'Psychogeography, HLIW, and CI'; 'Britishness and Nuclear Deterrence: AVBC and RW'; 'Cyclical history as post-British critique in RW'; 'Hauntology in RW, Elmet, and The Wicker Man'; 'How Mark Fisher's critique differs from nostalgia'; 'Is nostalgia particularly British?'; 'Why is hauntology so concerned with the 1970s?'; 'What hauntology tells us about the 2020s'; 'The "Anglo-Israeli" tradition in recent writing, or, why England is "enchanted" in Jerusalem and Elmet'; 'Jacobitism and The Wicker Man'; 'Folk Horror, Collapse, and Return'.