ENGL30312 American Specialisms from LTSU on Vimeo.
Year: Final
Part of the year: Full Year
Module Leader: Daniel Cordle
Assessments:
Keywords:
American; regional; local colour; gothic; grotesque; domestic; home; uncanny; nuclear; atomic; radiation; Cold War; anxiety; Apocalypse.
Description:
On this module you engage with developments at the cutting edge of academic work on American literature, working with tutors in their areas of specialist research and expertise. We move between two distinct and separate areas: Regionalism (coordinated by Stephanie Palmer) and Nuclear Literature (coordinated by Daniel Cordle).
Regionalism (Stephanie Palmer)
This section of the module introduces you to ‘local colour’ fiction that, between 1850 and 1910, was one of the most popular forms of literary narrative among American writers and readers. Regionalism immersed readers in the details of particular places in the United States. From its beginnings, but particularly since the 1990s, local colour fiction has raised questions about how regions are created, the status of the subordinate place in a national or global world and the possibility of producing a truly democratic national literature. Critics have quarrelled over whether the genre reproduces stereotypes of quaint and backward provincials or proffers an oppositional viewpoint on such dominant ideologies as the American Dream, the separate spheres ideology and white supremacy. As well as reading late nineteenth-century fictions, we consider what happens to the genre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the ‘revolt from the village’ and the rise of the southern gothic.
Nuclear Literature (Daniel Cordle)
In this section of the module we work on the cultural impact of a key contemporary technology. Military and civilian nuclear technology has had an enormous cultural, social and political impact since it was first developed in the middle of the twentieth century and we will investigate how it has shaped, and been shaped by, literature, from the populist to the more obviously literary. Reading in a wide variety of genres (e.g. the novel, the short story, science fiction, feature journalism and memoir), we explore some of the fears of nuclear war and of nuclear technology more generally and how literature represented and explored these. Although the threat of global holocaust most obviously haunted the Cold War period, you are likely to find that the subject resonates with contemporary anxieties.
Prerequisites: N/A
Useful Information:
American Literature; Nineteenth-Century Literature; Modern and Contemporary Literature; Culture; Politics; Place; 1889-Present
Structure: The module consists of five units of (roughly) five-weeks each. In the first four units we alternative between regional and nuclear literature, so that your knowledge of both specialisms remains fresh throughout. The final block is devoted to reviewing key ideas and preparation for the end-of-year essay.
Set texts (items must be purchased or borrowed unless otherwise noted):
Regional Literature
Hamlin Garland, ‘Up The Coulee’ (1891); ‘Under the Lion’s Paw’ (1889); ‘Among the Corn Rows’ (1890); ‘The Creamery Man’ (1897) [SHORT STORIES]
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Revolt of Mother and Other Stories [DATING VARIOUS]
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs [NOVEL]
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919) [NOVEL]
Gothic tales: Charles Chesnutt, ‘Po’ Sandy’ (1899); Eudora Welty, ‘Clytie’ (1941); Flannery O’Connor, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (1953) and ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ (1965) [SHORT STORIES – AVAILABLE VIA NOW]
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
Nuclear Literature
Douglas Coupland, ‘The Wrong Sun’ (1994) [SHORT STORY – AVAILABLE VIA NOW]
John Hersey, Hiroshima (2nd edition, 1985 [1946]) [BOOK CONTAINING LONG FEATURE ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORKER]
Nuclear literary ephemera: Judith Merril, ‘That Only a Mother’ (1948); Ray Bradbury, ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ (1950); Paul Auster, opening of In the Country of Last Things (1987); Don DeLillo, ‘October 8, 1953,’ from Underworld (1998) [SHORT STORIES AND EXCERPTS – AVAILABLE VIA NOW]
Philip K. Dick, The Penultimate Truth (1964) [NOVEL]
Tim O’Brien, The Nuclear Age (1985) [NOVEL]
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (1991) [MEMOIR]
Changes to the above will only take place if texts go out of print or are otherwise unavailable. There may be minor additions to the primary reading list.
Teaching methods/structure:
Lectures; directed reading and tasks; seminars; independent reading, research and thinking; introductions to specialist resources/approaches.
Please view the module specification for the learning outcomes for this module.
Contact details for further queries (module leader):
Email: daniel.cordle@ntu.ac.uk
Tel. 0115 848 3024
Office Hours in MAE 302: http://dfcordle.youcanbook.me/