TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LITERATURE
GENERAL READING
Robert Eagleston, Contemporary Literature: A Very Short Introduction
Peter Boxall, Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction
Sian Adiseshia and Rupert Hildyard, Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now
Dominic Head, The State of the Novel
David James, ed., The Legacies of Modernism
Rebecca Walkovwitz, ed., Immigrant Fictions
Week 1
Introductions
Primary Reading
Giorgio Agamben, 'What is the Contemporary', in Nudities (on Study Direct)
Zadie Smith, 'Two Directions for the Novel', in Changing my Mind (on Study Direct)
Peter Boxall, Introduction to Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (on Study
Direct)
Don DeLillo, The Body Artist
This first week will follow the lines set out in the symposia to address the issues at stake in
thinking about the contemporary. We will address the question of how it is possible to
achieve any critical perspective in our own century when it is so young. We will also place
the experience of the contemporary in terms of the relationship between late culture and
historical novelty. The last decades of the twentieth century were shaped by a sense of
historical lateness, the perception that we were reaching an end point in the history of western
culture. How does the new century recalibrate our sense of historical age, and how does such
change influence our understanding of the passage of literary critical thinking? A
consideration of DeLillo’s The Body Artist will provide focus for this opening discussion.
Secondary Reading
Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction
Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions
David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language
Philip Nel, 'Don DeLillo's Return to Form: The modernist poetics of The Body Artist'
Anne Longmuir, 'Performing the body in Don DeLillo's The Body Artist'
L. Di Prete, 'Don DeLillo's The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma'
Week 2
Into the Millennium
This week, we look at two late stage artists whose own late phase coincides with the entry
into the new millennium. We will ask how these writers register a new period, both in terms
of their sense of historical location and own aesthetic development. Barnes, for instance,
revisits Frank Kermode's classic text Sense of an Ending to ask how we understand the
accumulation and completion of a life under contemporary historical conditions. Roth too is
haunted by the pressures, as well as possibilities, of particular endings/exits. What do these
writers suggest about the experience of exhaustion or disorientation in the new century, and
what forms of novelty might we trace in their work? How do they encounter the persistence
of memory, and historical commitment, under new temporal, spatial and cultural conditions?
Said’s On Late Style will provide a conceptual frame for this week’s discussion.
Primary Reading
Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
Julian Barnes, Sense of an Ending
Secondary reading
Edward Said, On Late Style (extract on Study Direct)
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (extract on Study Direct)
Nicholas Royle, 'Clipping'
Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer
Elaine B. Safer, The Later Novels of Philip Roth
Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative
Week 3
Art and Terror
The terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 represent, for many, the true beginning of the new
century. For commentators as widely different as Tony Blair and Don DeLillo, it is this event
that is the motor of historical change under contemporary conditions. One of the cultural
forms that has been most prominent in working through the historical impact of the event is
the contemporary novel. We will address two of the most influential '9/11 novels' to have
emerged in the last years, to ask how historical change, and a new balance of power, is
reflected in the contemporary imagination. We will also look at Paul Greengrass' inventive
cinematic representation of the attacks, which is extraordinarily attentive to the way the event
reshapes our understanding of speed, velocity, weight, and forms of contemporary
representation. How do these three texts, taken together, help us to understand the unfolding
relationship between art and terror, and how do we understand the role of the counter-cultural
thinker or activist under the global conditions that led to and emerge from 9/11?
Primary Reading
Amy Waldman, The Submission
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Paul Greengrass, dir., United 93
Secondary Reading
Don DeLillo, 'In the Ruins of the Future' (available online at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo)
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism
Judith Butler, Precarious Life
James Marsh, dir., Man on Wire
See a wide range of journalistic responses to 9/11 by contemporary writers, on the Guardian
website.
Paul Virilio, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel
Singh, Harleen, 'Insurgent Metaphors: Decentering 9/11 in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant
Fundamentalist and Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows', in Ariel, 43, 1, 2012
Bjerre, Thomas Aervold, 'Post-9/11 Literary Masculinities in Kalfus, DeLillo, and Hamid', in
Orbis Literarium
Claudia Perner, 'Tracing the Fundamentalist in Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke and The
Reluctant Fundamentalist' in Ariel, 41, 3, 2010
Week 4
Time on the Move
One of the defining features of contemporary experience is the perception of a shift in the
way we register temporality. This comes about in part from the combination of new
technologies for the measuring, recording and production of time, with the shifts in the
texture of historical experience attendant on the entry into a new century, and a new period of
modernity. We will look at this unfolding of a new kind of temporal orientation in two
writers, Egan and Eggers, whose recent work has turned around this problem. Egan produces
a mobile and inventive form for the reinscription of temporal experience in a digital age,
while Eggers offers a prescient and darkly comic vision of a tightly securitised and monitored
future. Reading these works together we will ask what aesthetic, cultural and technological
devices we have available to us to occupy such a mobile time.
Primary Reading
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Dave Eggers, The Circle
Secondary Reading:
Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and Postmodernism (extract on Study Direct)
Achille Mbembe, 'Time on the Move' in Mbembe, On the Postcolony
Charlie Reilly, 'An Interview with Jennifer Egan', in Contemporary Literature, 50, 3, 2009
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity
Week 5
Manufacturing bodies
It is perhaps the case that the literary imagination has always set itself the task of fashioning
bodies for ourselves to live in (think of Swift's Gulliver, Kafka's Gregor Samsa,
Shakespeare's Hamlet, Emily Dickinson's cleft bodies). But this task takes on a new
resonance in contemporary culture with the development of an extraordinarily prostheticised,
edited, manipulated body. We are living through a time when the body is more augmented,
extended, and reshaped than at any other period in history. The works that we look at this
week set out to reimagine the body under such conditions. Ishiguro's clones, and Smith's
metamorphosed bodies, emerge from a culture in which biological life has become strange to
us. As such, they set out to imagine a new ethics of bodily inhabitation under such altered
conditions. What becomes of our notion of the human in this context? How do we think
about sexuality, gender, class, memory? What are the liberations of this prostheticised
condition, and what are the threats?
Primary Reading
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy
Art work by Patricia Piccinini, Eduardo Kac, Vanessa Beecroft, Orlan
Secondary reading
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (extract on Study Direct)
Gabriele Griffin 'Science and the cultural imaginary: the case of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let
Me Go', Textual Practice, 23, 4, 2009
Matthew Eatough, 'The Time that Remains: Organ Donation, Temporal Duration, and
Bildung in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go', in Literature and Medicine, 29, 1 2011
Eduardo Kac, Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond
Simon Shepherd, ed., Orlan: A Hybrid body of artworks (extract on Study Direct)
Peter Carey, The Chemistry of Tears
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled
Week 6
The contemporary Short Story
This week will focus on what has been called the renaissance in the short story, and
particularly on the short work of Munro (recent Nobel Prize winner), Foster Wallace, Hilary
Mantel, James Kelman and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We will ask what the short form is
able to do that the longer novel cannot, what the relationship is between the short form and
landscape, character, and experimentation, and finally why the form has become so important
under contemporary conditions.
Primary reading
Alice Munro, from Runaway
David Foster Wallace, from Oblivion
James Kelman, from Translated Accounts
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from The Thing Around Your Neck
Hilary Mantel, 'Comma'
Secondary reading
Adrian Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English
Per Winther, et al, The Art of Brevity
Boswell and Burn, eds., A Companion to Foster-Wallace Studies
Adrian Hunter, 'James Kelman and the Short Story', in The Edinburgh Companion to James
Kelman
Robert Thacker, The End of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro
Isla Duncan, The Narrative Art of Alice Munro
Week 7
READING WEEK
Week 8
Contemporary Poetics
This week will focus on the relationship between political radicalism, formal experimentation
and contemporary poetics. We will focus on the work of Keston Sutherland, but the
discussion will range across the work of other contemporary poets, including J.H. Prynne,
Denise Riley, and Drew Milne. We will also arrange for some poetry readings to take place
around the seminar to inform discussion.
Primary Reading
Keston Sutherland, Odes to TL61P
Secondary Reading
Nathan Hamilton, Dear World and Everyone in it.
Drew Milne, Go Figure
Simon Jarvis, 'The Poetry of Keston Sutherland', Chicago Review 53 (1): 139–145
Nerys Williams, Contemporary Poetry
Peter Boxall, ed, Thinking Poetry
David Caplan, Questions of Possibiity: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form
Week 9
Formal experiment
There is a perception that formal experimentation in the novel has dried up in the aftermath
of Modernism and Postmodernism. The novel (so this story goes) has returned in the new
century to a rather dull kind of bland realism. This week we will investigate the current of
experimentalism in the contemporary novel, to ask what the scope is for formal innovation in
fiction, what its aesthetic and political purpose is, and what version of the future of the novel
arises from it. Also, we will ask what we mean by realism now, and what it means to diverge
from it.
Primary Reading
Eimer McBride, A Girl is a half formed thing
J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year
Secondary reading
Bray, Gibbons and McHale, eds., A Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature
Gayatri Spivak, 'Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching'
Gayatri Spivak, 'Reading in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe'
Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame
J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point
Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading
Week 10
Trauma, memory and legacy
One of the legacies of the last century is a deep crisis in our capacity to bear witness to
historical events. As Primo Levi has argued, one of the violences of the Holocaust was the
effect it had on our capacity to give it historical expression. An atrocity of such magnitude
seems to defy our capacity to place it in a historical context, or to understand what led to it,
and what it gives rise to. One effect of the unspeakable and unprecedented trauma of the last
century has been to challenge our ability to produce coherent and credible historical accounts
of political violence. It is in response to this problem that a body of twenty-first century
writing has emerged, which seeks to produce a new form in which to give expression to
historical reality. Sebald's work, and particularly his 2000 novel Austerlitz, has been more
influential than any in rethinking our contact with the past, but many writers have built on his
experiments. Given discourses such as comparative trauma studies, we will look at Sebald's
work alongside Minoli Salgado’s 2014 novel A Little Dust on the Eyes, which takes the Sri
Lankan civil war as one of its backdrops. What does it mean to discuss trauma in
‘transnational’ terms? Is there anything ‘lost in translation’ when it comes to attempting such
traumatic representation? A contrapuntal consideration of Salgado’s novel alongside
Sebald’s will enable us to ask how the literary imagination is able to save pictures of the past;
what the relationship between aesthetics, remembrance and history is; and how a
contemporary conception of history and memory is emerging now, which differs from that
associated with the late twentieth century.
Primary Reading
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Minoli Salgado, A Little Dust on the Eyes
Secondary Reading
Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
Elizabeth Goldberg, Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature
The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing, ed. Jane Kilby
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (extract on Study
Direct)
Tom McCarthy and International Necronautical Society, Calling All Agents: Transmission,
Death, Technology: General Secretary's Report to the International Necronautical Society
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question
Grant Gee, dir, Patience (after Sebald)
W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
W.G. Sebald, Campo Santo
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants
Lynne Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald
Week 11
Transnational Dislocations
How might the ‘African-American’ novel be conceived differently in the 21st century? Is
there any sense in which, as the Obama presidency draws towards a close, certain conceptual
as well as contextual co-ordinates may have shifted? In this session, we will consider two
novels that have been saddled with the designation ‘Afropolitan.’ By discussing the utility,
or otherwise, of this postcolonial supplement, we will explore the extent to which Selasi’s
Ghana Must Go and Teju Cole’s Open City register peculiarly 21st century tensions in their
work.
Primary Reading
Taiye Selasi, Ghana Must Go
Teju Cole, Open City
Secondary Reading
Aliki Varvogli, Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction
World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch
http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76
http://www.taiyeselasi.com/
http://www.tejucole.com/
http://africainwords.com/2013/02/08/exorcizing-afropolitanism-binyavanga-wainainaexplains-why-i-am-a-pan-africanist-not-an-afropolitan-at-asauk-2012/
‘Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism’,
Peter Vermeulen, Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 37, Number 1, Fall 2013
Week 12
The End
This week will focus on apocalyptic narratives, asking how far the contemporary is identified
with ecological disaster and with the encounter with the end of history. This week will also
feature a review of the module as a whole.
Primary Reading
Cormac McCarthy, The Road