Module Code - Title:
EH6012
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POLITICS AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
Year Last Offered:
2023/4
Hours Per Week:
Grading Type:
Prerequisite Modules:
Rationale and Purpose of the Module:
EH6012 Politics and American Literature reads current debates in American Literature in relation to relevant social and historical contexts in order to explore the ways in which literature reflects or affects American life, culture, and identities. Whether using the events of 11 September 2001 to engage with trauma theory and with literary issues of testimony, mourning, and memory, or using the occasion of the election of the first black US president to discuss questions of racial identity and social equality, this module will study the ruptures, continuities, and transitions in Americas story, the concomitant impacts on literary tradition, and the part literature plays in negotiating responses to such events. By referring also to non-literary sources, including personal narratives, newspaper articles, documentaries and photographs, literatures part in representing, interpreting, memorialising or transcending events will be examined.
Syllabus:
This module relates American fiction, poetry, and drama to contemporary concerns and debates, drawing on, for example, theories of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, globalisation, Marxism, cultural materialism, new historicism, ecocriticism, gender, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. Attention will be paid to political, social, and cultural contexts (for example, the American Revolution, Abolitionism, the Great Depression, the World Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, 9/11/2001), to significant concepts and philosophies (for example, realism, naturalism, modernism, postmodernism), and to literary movements (for example, Transcendentalism, regional writing, the Lost Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Generation, New Journalism).
Learning Outcomes:
Cognitive (Knowledge, Understanding, Application, Analysis, Evaluation, Synthesis)
On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
Interpret and criticise texts through close reading, analyse them in their socio-historical context, and place them within relevant theoretical debates.
Examine particular American literatures, their forms and themes, in the context of an American literary tradition.
Identify the cultural and political values informing literary and non-literary texts.
Evaluate developments in contemporary American literature.
Discuss the specificity or universality of events and their representations.
Affective (Attitudes and Values)
On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
Demonstrate an informed appreciation of the literary, theoretical, ethical, political and societal questions raised by American literature and by the critical discussion of that literature.
Psychomotor (Physical Skills)
N/A
How the Module will be Taught and what will be the Learning Experiences of the Students:
The module will be taught through a combination of lectures and seminars that engage with selected primary texts and that are supplemented by secondary literary and critical material (assigned, recommended, and/or sourced by students). Lectures will combine contextualisation with close reading, illustrated, where necessary, by visual and audio material. Seminars will have an emphasis on participative group-work, and, through a focus on critical discussion, will develop advanced skills in conceptual understanding, analysis, and expression.
Research Findings Incorporated in to the Syllabus (If Relevant):
Prime Texts:
Baym, N. (Ed.). (2007)
Norton Anthology of American Literature (7th edition)
, New York, NY: W. W. Norton
Bercovitch, S. (Ed.). (2006)
Cambridge History of American Literature
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Other Relevant Texts:
Annesley, J. (2006)
Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel
, London: Continuum
Bak, H. (Ed.). (2004)
Uneasy Alliance: Twentieth-Century American Literature, Culture and Biography
, Amsterdam: Rodopi
Baker, B. (2008)
Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945¿2000
, London: Continuum
Baringer, S. (2004)
The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth Century America
, New York, NY: Routledge
Baudrillard, J (2002)
The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. Trans. Chris Turner
, London: Verso
Bennett, M (2005)
Democratic Discourses: The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Literature
, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press
Berger, A. L., and G. L. Cronin (Eds.). (2004)
Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in the Postmodern World
, . Albany, NY: SUNY Press
Programme(s) in which this Module is Offered:
Semester - Year to be First Offered:
Module Leader:
david.coughlan@ul.ie