TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE

GENERAL READING

Robert Eagleston, Contemporary Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Peter Boxall, Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction

Sian Adiseshia and Rupert Hildyard, Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now

Dominic Head, The State of the Novel

David James, ed., The Legacies of Modernism

Rebecca Walkovwitz, ed., Immigrant Fictions

Week 1

Introductions

Primary Reading

Giorgio Agamben, 'What is the Contemporary', in Nudities (on Study Direct)

Zadie Smith, 'Two Directions for the Novel', in Changing my Mind (on Study Direct)

Peter Boxall, Introduction to Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (on Study Direct)

Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

This first week will follow the lines set out in the symposia to address the issues at stake in thinking about the contemporary. We will address the question of how it is possible to achieve any critical perspective in our own century when it is so young. We will also place the experience of the contemporary in terms of the relationship between late culture and historical novelty. The last decades of the twentieth century were shaped by a sense of historical lateness, the perception that we were reaching an end point in the history of western culture. How does the new century recalibrate our sense of historical age, and how does such change influence our understanding of the passage of literary critical thinking? A consideration of DeLillos The Body Artist will provide focus for this opening discussion.

Secondary Reading

Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction

Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions

David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language

Philip Nel, 'Don DeLillo's Return to Form: The modernist poetics of The Body Artist'

Anne Longmuir, 'Performing the body in Don DeLillo's The Body Artist'

L. Di Prete, 'Don DeLillo's The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma'

Week 2

Into the Millennium

This week, we look at two late stage artists whose own late phase coincides with the entry into the new millennium. We will ask how these writers register a new period, both in terms of their sense of historical location and own aesthetic development. Barnes, for instance, revisits Frank Kermode's classic text Sense of an Ending to ask how we understand the accumulation and completion of a life under contemporary historical conditions. Roth too is haunted by the pressures, as well as possibilities, of particular endings/exits. What do these writers suggest about the experience of exhaustion or disorientation in the new century, and what forms of novelty might we trace in their work? How do they encounter the persistence of memory, and historical commitment, under new temporal, spatial and cultural conditions? Saids On Late Style will provide a conceptual frame for this weeks discussion.

Primary Reading

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

Julian Barnes, Sense of an Ending

Secondary reading

Edward Said, On Late Style (extract on Study Direct)

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (extract on Study Direct)

Nicholas Royle, 'Clipping'

Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread

Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

Elaine B. Safer, The Later Novels of Philip Roth

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 Chapters

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative

Week 3

Art and Terror

The terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 represent, for many, the true beginning of the new century. For commentators as widely different as Tony Blair and Don DeLillo, it is this event that is the motor of historical change under contemporary conditions. One of the cultural forms that has been most prominent in working through the historical impact of the event is the contemporary novel. We will address two of the most influential '9/11 novels' to have emerged in the last years, to ask how historical change, and a new balance of power, is reflected in the contemporary imagination. We will also look at Paul Greengrass' inventive cinematic representation of the attacks, which is extraordinarily attentive to the way the event reshapes our understanding of speed, velocity, weight, and forms of contemporary representation. How do these three texts, taken together, help us to understand the unfolding relationship between art and terror, and how do we understand the role of the counter-cultural thinker or activist under the global conditions that led to and emerge from 9/11?

Primary Reading

Amy Waldman, The Submission

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Paul Greengrass, dir., United 93

Secondary Reading

Don DeLillo, 'In the Ruins of the Future' (available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo)

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism

Judith Butler, Precarious Life

James Marsh, dir., Man on Wire

See a wide range of journalistic responses to 9/11 by contemporary writers, on the Guardian website.

Paul Virilio, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel

Singh, Harleen, 'Insurgent Metaphors: Decentering 9/11 in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows', in Ariel, 43, 1, 2012

Bjerre, Thomas Aervold, 'Post-9/11 Literary Masculinities in Kalfus, DeLillo, and Hamid', in Orbis Literarium

Claudia Perner, 'Tracing the Fundamentalist in Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist' in Ariel, 41, 3, 2010

Week 4

Time on the Move

One of the defining features of contemporary experience is the perception of a shift in the way we register temporality. This comes about in part from the combination of new technologies for the measuring, recording and production of time, with the shifts in the texture of historical experience attendant on the entry into a new century, and a new period of modernity. We will look at this unfolding of a new kind of temporal orientation in two writers, Egan and Eggers, whose recent work has turned around this problem. Egan produces a mobile and inventive form for the reinscription of temporal experience in a digital age, while Eggers offers a prescient and darkly comic vision of a tightly securitised and monitored future. Reading these works together we will ask what aesthetic, cultural and technological devices we have available to us to occupy such a mobile time.

Primary Reading

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Dave Eggers, The Circle

Secondary Reading:

Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and Postmodernism (extract on Study Direct)

Achille Mbembe, 'Time on the Move' in Mbembe, On the Postcolony

Charlie Reilly, 'An Interview with Jennifer Egan', in Contemporary Literature, 50, 3, 2009

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

Week 5

Manufacturing bodies

It is perhaps the case that the literary imagination has always set itself the task of fashioning bodies for ourselves to live in (think of Swift's Gulliver, Kafka's Gregor Samsa, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Emily Dickinson's cleft bodies). But this task takes on a new resonance in contemporary culture with the development of an extraordinarily prostheticised, edited, manipulated body. We are living through a time when the body is more augmented, extended, and reshaped than at any other period in history. The works that we look at this week set out to reimagine the body under such conditions. Ishiguro's clones, and Smith's metamorphosed bodies, emerge from a culture in which biological life has become strange to us. As such, they set out to imagine a new ethics of bodily inhabitation under such altered conditions. What becomes of our notion of the human in this context? How do we think about sexuality, gender, class, memory? What are the liberations of this prostheticised condition, and what are the threats?

Primary Reading

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

Art work by Patricia Piccinini, Eduardo Kac, Vanessa Beecroft, Orlan

Secondary reading

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (extract on Study Direct)

Gabriele Griffin 'Science and the cultural imaginary: the case of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go', Textual Practice, 23, 4, 2009

Matthew Eatough, 'The Time that Remains: Organ Donation, Temporal Duration, and Bildung in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go', in Literature and Medicine, 29, 1 2011

Eduardo Kac, Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond

Simon Shepherd, ed., Orlan: A Hybrid body of artworks (extract on Study Direct)

Peter Carey, The Chemistry of Tears

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled

Week 6

The contemporary Short Story

This week will focus on what has been called the renaissance in the short story, and particularly on the short work of Munro (recent Nobel Prize winner), Foster Wallace, Hilary Mantel, James Kelman and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We will ask what the short form is able to do that the longer novel cannot, what the relationship is between the short form and landscape, character, and experimentation, and finally why the form has become so important under contemporary conditions.

Primary reading

Alice Munro, from Runaway

David Foster Wallace, from Oblivion

James Kelman, from Translated Accounts

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from The Thing Around Your Neck

Hilary Mantel, 'Comma'

Secondary reading

Adrian Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English

Per Wi