This module is an optional period module at Level 5. It will begin by exploring literature published from the 1930s through to the present day, and will examine the strategies writers have used in response to a changing Britain and wider world. We will consider how twentieth and twenty-first-century texts adapt realist, modernist and postmodern techniques to engage with issues such as the rise of mass culture, the threat of totalitarianism, the establishment of the Welfare State, post-war immigration, and sexual liberation. To enhance your perspective on these issues, you will be introduced to non-fiction material by other contemporary writers, such as J.B. Priestley, Erich Fromm, Iris Murdoch, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Hoggart, and George Lamming, as well as more recent critical and theoretical material. The module also examines the development and continuing popularity of realist drama in the twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which realist drama is used as a tool of social and political examination in the various contexts of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Dublin in the aftermath of the First World War, and the establishment of the welfare state in Britain after 1945. Secondly, we will examine the developments in non-realist forms of drama and the experiments which gave rise to what is, somewhat controversially, called the 'Theatre of the Absurd'. The module culminates with the study of a selection of texts chosen to illustrate the great variety of genres and styles in contemporary British literature and to exemplify literature written by different nationalities and social groups. Underpinned by relevant theoretical perspectives, questions will be raised about the relation between literature and contemporary events, with relation to issues pertinent to literature, such as social mobility, hybridity, democracy and technology. In recent years, authors studied have included Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Harold Pinter, Alan Hollinghurst, and Zadie Smith.
Students will study a range of novels from the post-war period up to the present day, for example texts as diverse as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956), Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962), J.G.Ballard's Cocaine Nights (1999), and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2005,) as well as poetry and drama, including key works such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, and Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party.
The class will meet for a one-hour interactive lecture which will situate the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century within appropriate historical, cultural and theoretical contexts. In some weeks the lecture will be replaced with a workshop which will enable students to work in small groups on questions raised in the previous week's lecture. The class will then divide into seminar groups which will be centred around class discussion and will involve close readings of the texts. The seminar will be based on the principles of collaborative learning, where classes will be structured to promote active learning and individual engagement with the texts.
| Definitive UNISTATS Category | Indicative Description | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled learning and teaching | 22x3 hour interactive lectures | 66 |
| Guided independent study | 234 | |
| Total (number of credits x 10) | 300 | |
The summative assessment for this module comprises:
1. A short essay of 1500 words (30%)
2. A long essay of 2500 words (60%)
3. 20 short in-class test responses (10%)
Formative assessments involve a variety of oral presentations in-class, active participation in workshops and seminars, weekly inquiry sheets, and meetings with the module leader and module tutors during independent study. Feedback will provided through peer review and by the module tutors. All assignments for formative assessment will be forward-led and focused on promoting students' progress in developing critical and communication skills throughout the year. The critical skills gained in this module will be tested in a variety of summative assessments within the portfolio and are designed to complement the work done by students in the two core Level 5 modules as well as feeding forward into the Level 6 Capstone module.
| Learning Outcome | Assessment Strategy |
|---|---|
| Know critically a variety of literary texts from the twentieth- to twenty-first centuries | Essays and in-class tests |
| Demonstrate a critical awareness of the literary strategies adopted by writers of the period | Essays and in-class tests |
| Apply an understanding of socio-historical, political, philosophical, and literary contexts to the texts studied | Essays and in-class tests |
| Provide evidence of skills in critical reading, analysis and discussion and the ability to express yourself succinctly and precisely | Essays and in-class tests |
| Have a command of the skills necessary for the writing of a sustained critical essay | Essays |
| Description of Assessment | Definitive UNISTATS Categories | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Coursework | Short Essay | 30% |
| Coursework | Long Essay | 60% |
| Coursework | In-Class Tests | 10% |
| Total (to equal 100%) | 100% | |
It IS NOT a requirement that any major assessment category is passed separately in order to achieve an overall pass for the module.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party
J.G.Ballard, Cocaine Nights (1999)
Bentley, Nick, Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
Brannigan, John, Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945-2000 (London: Palgrave, 2003)
Cunningham, Valentine, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: OUP, 1989)
Davies, Alistair and Alan Sinfield, eds, British Culture of the Postwar: an Introduction to Literature and Society (London, Routledge, 2000)
Day, Gary, ed., Literature and Culture in Modern Britain Vol. 2 1930-1955 (Harlow: Longman, 1997)
Esslin, Martin, Theatre of the Absurd (London: Methuen, 2001)
Fletcher, John, ed., Faber Critical Guides: Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 2000)
Gasiorek, Andrzej, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Arnold, 1995)
Greene, Gayle, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992)
Hawthorne, Jeremy, The British Working-class Novel in the Twentieth Century (London: Arnold, 1984)
Head, Dominic, The Cambridge introduction to Modern British Fiction 1950-2000 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002
Hopkins, Chris, English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History (London: Continuum, 2006)
Humble, Nicola, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920 to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford: OUP, 2001)
Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama 1890-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Lee, A. Robert, Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction (London: Pluto, 1995)
Maslen, Elizabeth, Political and Social Issues in British Women's Fiction, 1928-1968. (London: Palgrave, 2001)
McLeod, John, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2004)
Montefiore, Janet, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: the Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge,1996)
Philips, Deborah and Ian Haywood, Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions (London: Continuum, 1998)
Procter, James, Dwelling places: Postwar Black British Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)
Robbins, Bruce, Upward mobility and the common good: toward a literary history of the welfare state (Princeton University Press, 2007)
Shellard, Dominic, British Theatre Since the War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
Sinfield, Alan, ed., Society and literature 1945-1970 (London: Methuen, 1983)