Overview

This module is an introduction to some of the defining concerns, historical contexts and characteristic formal features of modern world literatures from 1789 to the present. The syllabus is divided into sections on literatures of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, nineteenth-century modernity and empire, modernism and world war, and the Cold War/decolonization period, with a focus on post-1989 writing in the third term. Teaching is by a weekly lecture and small-group seminar. Lectures introduce literary, historical and/or theoretical contexts as well as discussion of specific authors and works, while seminars involve closer discussion of the texts themselves.

The set texts we will be reading this year include the following:

Goethe, Faust Part I; Shelley, Frankenstein; Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”; Soseki, Kokoro; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary”; Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children; Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Lispector, Hour of the Star; Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven

A full list of this year’s set texts, as well as a week-by-week breakdown of the lectures, can be found by following the tabs above (see ‘Lecture List’ and ‘Set Texts’)

For students whose home department is English, the following texts are provided to you for free: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Stories and Natsume Soseki, Kokoro. You will be able to pick them up in Welcome Week.

Assessment

First-year students: 2 x 2,500-word essays.

Honours level (i.e., where the course is taken as an option by students not in their first year): 2 x 3,500-word essays (Level 5); 2 x 4,000-word essays (Level 6).

Visiting students: see guidance under Assessments.

See Assessments 24/25Link opens in a new window for further information.

Syllabus

Full syllabus.

Reading

Detail of the reading texts for this module (if long list, use a sub page and link to it)