English - Culture 3: Literature, History and Culture

The aim of this module is to encourage you to think transnationally and intertextually about literature and to explore the relationship between politics, societies and cultures within twentieth and twenty-first century history. The module expands the general themes introduced in LIHC 1 and encourages you to engage in critical dialogue with the canonical texts and transnational histories introduced in LIHC 2. It consists of two interconnected parts (outlined below). One part is concerned with theoretically informed literary analyses and runs for the entire 14 weeks of the semester with an alternation of 1 or 2 weekly lectures and a 3-hour seminar. The second part is concerned with contemporary global historical issues and is placed in the last 7 weeks of the semester consisting of 1 weekly lecture and a 2-hour seminar. Both parts are organised around thematically focused lectures tied to the seminars in which further discussion of the themes of the lectures will take place.

The literature part of the module invites you to engage in more detail in global, transnational and transcultural approaches to Anglophone literatures and stages literary texts of a variety of genres in dialogue with the broad historical themes considered later on in the semester. This module works across geographical locations and time periods and brings in general theories from the theoretical foundation of humanistic study, such as discourse, representation, authority and reception. This part also employs literary conceptualisations, such as ethnicity and diaspora, as well as broader theoretical perspectives on literature, such as migration. Our discussions will help you develop a critical and contextual platform that will inform your engagement with Anglophone texts, in particular American and postcolonial ones. The second part of the course considers historical and contemporary themes – which deal with relationships between politics, societies and cultures. Our case studies will consider transnational histories and networks across the English speaking World. Our critical focus is the varied processes of convergence, difference and hybridisation which constitute ‘globalisation’. The course also questions the meanings and usefulness of the term. In addition, the course uses ‘globalisation’ as a case study to investigate varieties of historical methodology and research approaches to the past.