Year: Final
Part of the year: Full Year
Module Leader: Philip Leonard
Assessments:
Keywords:
Literary criticism and theory; authorship and creative practice; poetics; subjectivity; gender and sexuality; bodies; machines and technology; deconstruction; post-structuralism; feminism; psychoanalysis; literature and/as theory; trauma; contemporary warfare.
Description:
Ideas about ‘English’ as a discipline have been vigorously debated in recent literary and critical theory, and ‘Theory Now’ explores some of the most significant controversies that are currently at the cutting edge of literary studies. Building on ideas introduced at levels 1 and 2, this module explores in greater depth the ways in which literary and critical theory can provoke a dramatic rethinking of cultural identities and their literary representations. This module will examine advanced concepts in post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory, as well as debates about the relationship between literature, bodies, and technology. It focuses in particular on questions about the production, interpretation, function, and value of literary texts.
Some of the issues that this module considers include:
We look at a broad range of theoretical and literary texts, including work by Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, N. Katherine Hayles, Julia Kristeva, Herman Melville, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Prerequisites: N/A
Useful Information:
Contemporary Literary and cultural theory; contemporary literature; late 20th and early 21st century.
Primary texts
Please note that the majority of these texts will be made available on NOW. These are identified below.
Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, ‘Readers and Reading’, in An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory 4th edn (London: Routledge, 2009). Available on NOW.
Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, ‘The Author’, in An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory 4th edn (London: Routledge, 2009). Available on NOW.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1993). Available on NOW.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010)
Jean Baudrillard, 'The Gulf War: is it really taking place?', in The Gulf War did not take place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Available on NOW.
Judith Butler, extract from chapter 3, ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). Available on NOW.
Cathy Caruth, 'Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History', Yale French Studies 79 (1991). Available on NOW.
Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 2005). Available on NOW.
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 'Desiring-Production' and 'The Body without Organs', in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: Athlone, 1984). Available on NOW.
Paul de Man, ‘Semiology and Rhetoric’, Diacritics 3:3 (1973). Available on NOW.
Jacques Derrida, 'The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing', in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Available on NOW.
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, trans. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). Available on NOW.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’, in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Norton, 1977). Available on NOW.
N. Katherine Hayles, 'Material Metaphors, Technotexts, and Media-Specific Analysis', in Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Available on NOW.
Julia Kristeva, from Revolution in Poetic Language, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Available on NOW.
Fritz Lang (dir.), Metropolis (1927/2010), screenplay by Thea von Harbou (Berlin: Universum-Film AG; restored Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, 2010)
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (London: Penguin, 2005)
Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’. Available online at Project Gutenberg.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (London: Penguin, 2006)
Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002); chapters 4 and 5. Available on NOW.
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (London: Vintage, 1993)
Teaching methods/structure:
Lectures; seminars; independent reading and thinking.
Please view the module specification for the learning outcomes for this module.
Contact details for further queries (module leader):
Email: philip.leonard@ntu.ac.uk
Phone: 0115 848 3074