HENKE2204U English - Free topic D: 20th and 21st Century Anglophone Literature in Perspective

100 Years of Literary Theory and Practice: Anglophone Literature from Modernism to Postmodernism to (Post)-Postmodernism – and Beyond (IBS)

How has Anglophone literature evolved over the last one hundred years? What are the principal modes of thought and literary practice in the 20^th and 21^st centuries? What is this concept of ‘modernism’ that features centrally in the overarching currents and what happens to it as we add another ‘post’ – and yet another ad absurdum? How did we think about literature after the first world war, after the second world war, after 9/11? What forms were experimented with? And what is going on on the literary scene right now in the era of ‘post truth’ and social media? Is a ‘new humanism’ making itself felt in the second decade of the 21^st century?

This is your chance to look back over the last one hundred years of literature on both sides of the Atlantic and think about such key concepts as representation, language, narrative, power, simulation as we discuss such topics as equality, gender, ethnicity, violence, emotion and the latest neuroscientific  perspectives on the phenomenon of reading.

Reading Mobility: Exile, Migrant, Refugee (ERK)

In this part of the module, we will study literature that spans the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries through a focus on the central figures of the exile, the migrant and the refugee, in both literary and theoretical texts. We will begin by conceptualising mobility in order to establish a theoretical platform from which to study exile literature, then we will explore (im)migrant literature, focusing on ‘traditional’ postcolonial texts of the mid to late 20^th century, and finally we will engage in early 21^st century refugee literature in connection with the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. We will end the course by considering the figure of the traveller as a reconceptualised and democratising figure that troubles many of the more established ways of reading mobility.