HENB01471U 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 builds upon and expands the general themes and approaches introduced in LIHC 1 and encourages you to engage in critical dialogue with the canonical texts introduced in LIHC 2. It consists of two overlapping and 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 and 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 transnational, global and transcultural approaches to Anglophone literatures and stages literary texts of a variety of genres in intertextual dialogue and 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 epistemology, hermeneutics, discourse, representation, authority and reception. Apart from the theoretical foundation of humanistic study, this part also employs literary theories and conceptualisations, such as race, ethnicity or diaspora, as well as broader theoretical perspectives on literature, such as literature and migration and literature as world making activity. 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. Topics may include the Atlantic World, global migration systems, the 1968 youth revolutions, and twenty-first century challenges to cosmopolitanism and regionalism. You will complete the history part of the module with a short oral seminar presentation on a historical topic.