UCL ENGLISH
M.A. ISSUES IN MODERN CULTURE
OPTIONS MENU
SPRING TERM 2016
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COUNTERFEIT CULTURE:
AUTHENTICITY AND ORIGINALITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Robert Turner
What role is played by authenticity in the literature of the past half century? It has
become a critical commonplace that the search for truth and subjectivity, so crucial
in the modernist novel, was abandoned in much postmodern literature. Among the
“casualties of the postmodern period” recorded by Fredric Jameson was the
“existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity”. By contrast, the contemporary
age has been marked by the emergence of the so-called “New Sincerity” movement
in American prose. This course will re-examine the changing attitudes towards truth
and authenticity across the period, mapping the technological, epistemological and
political aspects of changing attitudes to originals, copies, and the “Real Thing”.
Outline
1. Counterfeit Culture
 Henry James, ‘The Real Thing’ (1892)
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (1856)
 Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842)
2. Forgery and Deception
 William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955) [excerpts to be provided]
 Orson Welles (dir.), F For Fake (1974)
3. Technology and Subjectivity
 Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965) [excerpts to be
provided]
 Andy Warhol, a: a novel (1968)
 Mark Twain, ‘A Literary Nightmare’ (1876)
4. Bad History
 Thomas Pynchon, ‘The Secret Integration’ (1964), included in Slow Learner
(1984)
 William T. Vollmann, The Rifles (1994)
 Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds (2009)
5. New Sincerity and Conceptualism
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David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999)
Vanessa Place, Statement of Facts (2010)
Kenneth Goldsmith, Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013)
Recommended Reading
o Roland Barthes, ‘The discourse of history’ (1967), in Keith Jenkins (ed.) The
Postmodern History Reader (1997)
o Jean Baudrillard, America (1986), trans. Bernard Grasset (1999)
o Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity (2012)
o Jonathan Franzen, ‘Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the problem of hard-toread books’ (The New Yorker, 30 September 2002)
o Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital
Age (2011)
o N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999)
o Adam Kelly, ‘David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction’
(2010)
o Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (1968)
o Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), trans. Winthrop and
Wutz (1999)
o Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’ (Harper’s, February
2007)
o Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture,
1880-1940 (1989)
o Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius (2010)
o K.K. Ruthven, Faking Literature (2001)
o Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (1991)
o Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972)
o David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ (1991)
o Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death (1995)
o James Wood, ‘Tell Me How Does It Feel?’ (The Guardian, 6 October 2001)
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MODERNIST DAYS (and NIGHTS)
Nick Shepley
This course of seminars sets out to explore the state of the novel at the mid-century,
with a particular focus on the one-day (or circadian) novel. It will begin by looking
at how shifting notions of time and space (in physics, psychology and philosophy) at
the turn of the century were adopted and adapted by canonical modernist writers –
such as Joyce, Eliot and Woolf – as ways of experimenting with literary form. We will
then look at three authors in detail – Virginia Woolf, Henry Green and Jean Rhys – to
think about how their experiments with the one-day novel, at a formal level, can
offer us insights into the larger literary, historical and social shifts occurring at the
mid-century. The difference, say: between Mrs Dalloway (1925), The Waves (1931)
and Between the Acts (1940) – where WWI dominates the first, whilst WWII floods
the latter; or the move between city and country in Party Going (1939) and
Concluding (1948); or between day or night in Good Morning, Midnight (1939); or
between the shifting states of high, late, inter-, postcolonial or post-modernisms in
these authors. Finally, we will ask how these shifting modernisms continue to
inform and influence literary fiction today.
Provisional Outline:
1. Dawn
o Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
o Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)
o Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
2. Midday: Virginia Woolf
o The Waves (1931)
o Between the Acts (1940)
3. Dusk: Henry Green
o Party Going (1939)
o Concluding (1948)
4. Night: Jean Rhys
o Good Morning, Midnight (1939)
o “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf (1929)
o Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
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5. The Day After the Night Before
o Nicolson Baker, The Mezzanine (1988)
o Will Self, Umbrella (2012)
Recommended Further Reading
o Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880 – 1918 (Harvard UP,
2003)
o Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (OUP, 2009)
o Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (CUP, 2007)
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CULTURES OF CHANCE:
ACCIDENT, ERROR AND CATASTROPHE IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
FROM 1960 TO THE PRESENT.
JULIA JORDAN
WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION. Samuel Beckett, Lessness; Images, music and text excerpts
from Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Diebenkorn, John Cage, Christine Brooke-Rose
WEEK 2: ALEATORY NARRATIVE. B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates
WEEK 3: LUDIC LITERATURE. Sophie Calle, Double Game [images and text provided in
class, as the book is quite expensive!]; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
WEEK 4: ACCIDENTAL TEXTS. J.G. Ballard, Crash; Atrocity Exhibition; Critical excerpts
from Paul Virilio
WEEK 5: 21ST CENTURY CATASTROPHE. Tom McCarthy, Remainder; William Basinski,
Disintegration Loops [available on YouTube]
Metaphors of chance and the accidental can be said to dominate the post-’45 period
of literature and art. In a postwar period characterized by fragmentation, with a
backdrop of the new science of uncertainty and the emergence of chaos theory,
scientific and cultural disciplines move towards an interest in the competing forces
of order and disorder. Indeed, postmodernism itself can be understood as part of
this shift, as culture moves away from a modernist mourning for lost meaning and
instead begins to articulate an affinity with indeterminism and uncertainty. Novels
are broken up to become shuffleable; in the visual arts artists work with found
objects, and with paint thrown randomly onto canvases; John Cage and Samuel
Beckett let the accidental determine the precepts of their artistic composition.
In the period from 1960s to the present, then, chance and the accident become
fundamental to cultural production, and this course will investigate the extent to
which this is particularly true of post-1960 literature and literary theory. We will
read texts that take aleatory precepts as central organizing factors (the shuffleable
narrative of B.S. Johnson, the ludic experimentation of Nabokov and Calle, the
collisions, crashes and catastrophes of Ballard and McCarthy) and explore concepts
such as jouissance and the clinamen. In doing so we will discuss the extent to which
the commonly held crisis of representation that seems to take place in this period is
fundamentally a crisis of uncertainty, as Robert Coover writes: ‘All of us today are
keenly aware that we are undergoing a radical shift in sensibilities. We are no longer
convinced of the nature of things, of design as justification. Everything seems itself
random.’
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Further Reading
o Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (London: Hill & Wang, 1980)
o Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999)
o Joseph M Conte, Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction
(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002)
o Jacques Derrida, ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some
Epicurean Stereophonies’, in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and
Literature, eds.
o Joseph H Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984)
o Raymond Federman, Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (New York: SUNY Press,
1993)
o Ross Hamilton, Accident (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2007)
o Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident (London: Polity Press, 2012)
o Jerry A. Varsava, Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the
Reader (Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1990).
o Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (London: Polity Press, 2005)
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MARXIST AESTHETICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Matthew Beaumont
This Option will trace the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the work of
the philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School, exploring the early C20
debates about realism and modernism and examining, among other issues, the
meanings of the avant garde. In all but the first session, each one will focus on a
single, significant essay, often with particular attention to literature.
1. Georg Lukacs et al (debates over realism and modernism in Fredric Jameson ed.,
Aesthetics and Politics [new edition, 2007])
2. Walter Benjamin (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’)
3. Bertolt Brecht (‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’)
4. Theodor Adorno (‘Trying to Understand Endgame’)
5. Ernst Bloch (‘A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel’)
Preliminary Secondary Reading
o Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (1976)
o Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory (Very Short Introductions, 2011)
o Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (1996)
o Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (1992)
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FREUD
Rachel Bowlby
This course provides the opportunity to look at the range of Freud’s writings—its
many genres (case history, lecture, polemic, essay; some for specialist and some for
general readerships), and its many fields of theoretical and therapeutic exploration:
the divided self; sexuality and the development of gender; cultural history and
collective psychology; literature, memory and fantasy; everyday life—to name some.
Throughout, we will relate the issues and debates evoked in Freud’s texts to
present-day arguments about such topics as sexuality and gender; personal and
collective memory; ‘modern’ mental disorders and the place of the ‘talking cure’.
The following is a provisional outline of the week-by-week topics; all the
readings can be found in the 15-volume Penguin Freud Library (‘PFL’). ‘SE’ refers to
the 24-volume Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, which is available in paperback; the Penguin texts are taken from this. (Note
that—confusingly—there’s also a different collection of more recent Penguin Freud
texts, all with different translators.) For those who can make use of it, I’ve also given
references to the complete German edition, as ‘GW’ (Gesammelte Werke).
The Standard Edition is arranged chronologically, the (numbered) Penguin
thematically. So knowing the date of a text will enable you to find it in the SE, but
with PFL you have to know if the text you want is there at all, and if so where. Also,
the whole of Freud in English is now available online…
For each week, the principal reading for seminar discussion is given first.
‘Further Reading’ is additional, if you have time or if you decide to do more work on
this topic. Where only the author’s name is given, the reference is to the
bibliography.
Week 1 Beginning Psychoanalysis
Freud, ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, in Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on
Hysteria (1895), SE 2: 255-305, PFL 3; ‘Zur Psychotherapie des Hysterie’, in Studien
über Hysterie, GW 1: 252-312
Further reading:
Any of the six case study chapters in Studies in Hysteria, especially ‘Anna O’.
Week 2 Presenting Psychoanalysis
Freud, Introductory Lectures (1916-17): PFL 1, SE 16-17, GW 11. The following five
(all from SE 17) are the ones to concentrate on:
XIX Resistance and Repression
XXIV Common Neurotic States
XXVI Libido and Narcissism
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XXVII Transference
XXVIII Analytic Therapy
Further reading: any of the rest of the lectures—and also New Introductory Lectures
(1933): PFL 2, SE 22, GW 15
Week 3 Masculinity and Modern Life
‘”Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (1908): PFL 12, SE 9, GW 7
‘A Special Type of Object-Choice Made by Men’ (1910): PFL 7, SE 11, GW 8
‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (1912): PFL 7, SE
11, GW 8
Fetishism’ (1927): PFL 7, SE 21, GW 14
Week 4 Women and Other Misfit Narratives
‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), PFL 7, SE 19, GW 13
‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’
(1925), PFL 7, SE 19, GW 14
‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), PFL 7, SE 22, GW 14
‘Femininity’ (1933), PFL 2, SE 22, GW 15
Further reading:
Bersani; Bowlby (1992), ch. 8; Brennan (ed.); Mitchell (1974)
Week 5 Everyday Madness and Creativity
‘Bungled Actions’, chapter VIII of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), PFL
5, SE 6, GW 4 (‘Das Vergreifen’)
‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ (1908), SE 9: 143-58; ‘Der Dichter und das
Phantasieren’, GW VII: 213-26
‘Family Romances’ (1909), SE 9: 237-41, PFL 7; ‘Der Familienroman der Neurotiker’,
GW 7: 227-34
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), ch. II (5 pages on the Fort/Da game): SE 18,
PFL 11: 281-7; GW 13
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Bibliography
Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century
France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994)
Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993)
Christopher Bollas, Hysteria (London: Routledge, 1999)
Rachel Bowlby, Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (Oxford:
OUP, 2007)
Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (London:
Routledge, 1992)
Teresa Brennan (ed.), Between Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Routledge,
1989)
Georges Didi-Hubermann, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpêtrière (1982), trans. Alisa Hartz (Boston: MIT P, 2003)
Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling
Relationships on the Human Condition (London: Penguin, 2000)
Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1973; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974)
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 18301980 (London: Virago, 1987)
1998)
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997; London: Picador,
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21st-Century Fiction
Michael Sayeau
This seminar will examine novels published during the 21st-century. In particular,
we will consider the following issues:
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What does it mean to be an ‘avant garde’ writer today? (Is it even possible?)
How are writers responding to the internet?
How do writers responds to the demands of a changing market for books.
How does the ‘professionalisation’ of writing via academia effect
contemporary novels?
What ethical issues are involved in using the novel to respond to
contemporary events?
How is the notion of ‘literary’ fiction changing?
The reading list for this course is not yet ready, as I like it to deal with very
contemporary fiction, some of which I’ll be reading myself for the first time over the
summer. We’ll almost certainly cover Karl Ove Knausgaard (probably the most
influential writer working today). I’ll have the full list ready by the start of the
autumn term.
Recommended Secondary Material
o David Shields, Reality Hunger
o Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative
Writing
o Chad Harbach, ed., MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction
o James Wood on ‘Hysterical Realism’:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman
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