BA in English
Year 1 Modules, 2015-2016
Texts in Time 1 (teaching block 1, ie autumn)
Convenor:
Dr Michael Jones
Course code:
Texts in Time 1 Q3121
Level and credits:
Texts in Time 1 30 credits at level 4
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General Information
Module Description
What is literature? How has it changed over time? What is the relationship between writing
and the historical moment in which it was produced? How can we read texts to understand
the ways in which they comment on and intervene in their particular cultural contexts? How
do literary and other kinds of cultural artefacts enable us to reinterpret history and culture?
How does the study of texts from other historical periods better enable us to understand our
own?
These are some of the questions which we will be exploring during this module. Texts in
Time 1 explores many different kinds of writing (poetry, autobiography, essays, novels) as
well as visual texts (photography, the graphic novel) in their historical and cultural
contexts. Texts in Time 1 is divided into three blocks. The first block (weeks 1-4)
addresses texts from the nineteenth century, the second block (weeks 5-8) focuses on
Modernist texts. The final block (weeks 9-12) looks at contemporary writing and culture.
Most weeks bring a new text or texts into consideration, but all are connected within each
block to an overarching theme. Note there will be no teaching in week 7, which is a
reading week.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of Texts in Time 1, a successful student will be able to:
•
Demonstrate a developed understanding of relationships between literary texts and
their historical contexts.
•
Offer sustained analysis of literary texts from a number of historical periods.
•
Show developed critical and close reading skills in written responses to module
material.
Assessment
The module is assessed by a portfolio of writing exercises, an essay and an exam.
Definitive assessment information, including exact submission deadlines, will be published
on Sussex Direct.
Teaching
The module is taught via 1 x 1hr lecture, 1 x 2hr workshop, and 1 x 2hr seminar per week.
Details of the texts and topics for the lecture and seminar discussion each week are given
further on in this handbook. The workshops each week will include a variety of activities
focused on that week’s reading, to support your preparation for the week’s seminar; it also
addresses academic, writing and study skills. A document giving details of the workshops for
each semester will be available on Study Direct. You should note that preparatory exercises
are required in advance of some workshops.
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You should be sure to do the core reading (including core secondary reading, usually one or
two chapters or articles) in advance of your lecture, workshop and seminar each week. In
many cases, we hope to make copies of the core secondary reading available online, either
via the Library reading lists function, or via the Texts in Time 1 Study Direct site. You should
acquire your own copies of the core primary reading: all the relevant books are listed
separately at the end of this document, as well as being given in the detailed module outline
below. The recommended secondary reading listed for each week offers some suggestions
for further reading. This will be helpful in developing your thinking each week, and in
preparation of essays. Remember, there are further resources available in the library – more
than we can list here – do browse the shelves and search the catalogue to find criticism and
contextual studies which help you to develop your particular interests. There will also be a
Study Direct site for the module, where further resources will be made available.
Attendance Requirements
Texts in Time 1 (autumn semester) and Texts in Time 2 (spring) both involve one
one-hour lecture, one two-hour seminar and one two-hour workshop each week.
Details of times and venues will be notified via Sussex Direct. You will be in the
same group of students for your workshop as for your seminar.
You are expected to attend workshops, seminars and lectures. If you miss a workshop or
seminar because of illness or for other good cause, you should email the tutor, if possible in
advance of the class. If your attendance is unsatisfactory, you will receive a formal letter of
warning from your tutor. If you continue to miss classes without good reason, you will be
required to attend a meeting with a member of the School Management group. Students
encountering difficulties affecting their ability to attend seminars and workshops should seek
help, advice and support from their academic advisors and/or the Student Life Centre.
Core Primary Reading
PLEASE NOTE: You are expected to have a copy of the week’s core reading with you
during your seminars and workshops. Where no particular edition is specified, you are
welcome to use any good-quality scholarly edition (but avoid cheap editions, which may be
abridged and will lack scholarly notes).
Where a core text appears in the module outline but is not included in the lists below,
copies of required material will be made available and/or details will be given of how the text
can be located or accessed online. Core and Recommended Secondary Reading for
each week is listed in the detailed module outline.
For Texts in Time 1
•
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
•
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. (Various suitable editions, e.g. OUP and Penguin)
•
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass (1871), in Lewis Carroll (ed. Hugh
Haughton) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
London: Penguin, 1997.
•
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. (Available in various suitable editions)
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•
Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. New York: Scribner, 2003.
•
O’Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, in print.
•
Gordimer, Nadine, July’s People. London: Bloomsbury, 2005.
•
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Available in various suitable editions)
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Module Outline
Autumn Term – Texts In Time 1
Block 1: Weeks 1-4
Dreams and Writing, 1820-1890
These four weeks explore the connections between dream, imagination, vision and writing,
focusing on texts from the nineteenth century – a period marked by the continuing impact of
Romantic ideas of imaginative vision, and also by the development of the new visual medium
of photography. The relationship between word and vision is explored in a num ber of ways.
How is the nineteenth-century realist novel informed by visual images? How do an opium
addict’s ‘confessions’ rework the relationship between vision and f antasy? Or to turn these
questions around: how can we write about the visual?
Week 1
Lecture: Dream, Writing and Imagination in the 19th Century
Richard Adelman
Core Texts
•
Extracts from Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and from
Suspiria de Profundis. Extracts from these texts will be available on Sussex Direct.
•
R. L. Stevenson, 'A Chapter on Dreams' [1887 (1888)], On Fiction An Anthology of
Literary and Critical Essays, ed. G. Norquay (Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1999)
•
J. Sully, 'The Dream as a Revelation' in Jenny Taylor, Sally Shuttleworth, Embodied
Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890.
Beginning with the significant place of dreams in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an
English Opium Eater (1832) and Suspria de Profundis (1847), and drawing upon psychological
writings, this lecture explores the widespread nineteenth century desire to interrogate the
dreaming mind and the place of dreams in waking life. The language in which De Quincey
articulates his opium dreams provides a means by which to question the function of dreams in
literary texts. What is the status of a dream – itself fictional – in a fictional text?
Recommended secondary reading
•
‘Piranesi's Prison: Thomas De Quincey and the Failure of Autobiography’, Curtis
Perry, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, No. 4, (Autumn, 1993), pp.
809-824
•
De Quincey’s Disciplines, Josephine McDonagh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
•
The infection of Thomas De Quincey: a psychopathology of imperialism, John Barrell,
Yale University Press, 1991).
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•
Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
•
Angela Leighton, ‘De Quincey and Women’, in John Whale and Stephen Copley eds.,
Beyond Romanticism (Routledge, 1992).
Week 2
Lecture: Jane Eyre and Imagination
Will Abberley
Core Text Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (any good scholary edition)
This lecture will consider representations of imagination, dream, consciousness and mind in
Brontë’s novel, including addressing visual elements of the text. Seminars and workshops will
consider this material in relation to the dream sequences in Jane Eyre, and consider how
dreams and dream writing modifies the realist methods of the nineteenth century novel.
Core secondary reading

Heather Glen, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (chapter on Jane Eyre)
(Oxford University Press, 2004)
Recommended secondary reading
•
John Bowen, ‘The Brontës and the Transformations of Romanticism’ in John Kucich
and Jenny Bourne Taylor, ed. The Nineteenth-Century Novel, 1820-1880, Oxford
University Press, 2012)
•
Michael Klotz, ‘Rearranging Furniture in Jane Eyre and Villette’, in English Studies in
Canada, 31:1 (2005), 10-26
Week 3
Lecture: Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Dream-Child
Hannah Field
Core Texts

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871), in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking Glass, ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 1997). Also
available in e book format (including mobile): Project Gutenberg.
This lecture considers the figure of the child in what is commonly referred to as the nightmarish
world of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, as opposed to the dream of Wonderland.
Continuing the focus on visions and dreams from the previous week, I ask how the child
represents alternative fantasies of perception, thought, and creativity for Carroll and some of his
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contemporaries—and to whom these fantasies belong (child or adult?). The lecture will also
discuss the multiple envisionings of Alice found in the work of artists who have illustrated or
responded to Carroll’s books, including John Tenniel, Ralph Steadman, and Salvador Dali.
Core Secondary Reading

Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), chapter on Lewis Carroll.
Recommended Secondary Reading

Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books’, in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press
of Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 435–43.

Sarah Gilead, ‘Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction’, PMLA 106
(1991): 277–93.

Jerome Griswold, Feeling like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006).

John Ruskin, ‘Fairy Land’, in vol. 33 of The Works of John Ruskin, available online
at http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/depts/ruskinlib/Bible%20of%20Amiens (pp.
327–49).

Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Imaginary Lands’, in The Mind of the Child: Child Development in
Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp.
75–87.
Week 4
Lecture: Oscar Wilde’s Dangerous Art
Hannah Field
Core Text
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Lewis Carroll encourages us to make the link between literary and visual images and to dwell
on the visual dimension of imaginative ‘vision’, but Oscar Wilde shows the ways in which
‘vision’ and the artistic imagination might be both dangerous and seductive. In this lecture I
will introduce some contexts for The Picture of Dorian Gray through the English aesthetic
movement and Wilde’s trials for “Gross Indecency”, as male homosexuality was described, in
the 1890s. I will consider the inverted relationship between art and reality in Dorian Gray and
focus on the problem of dangerous influence in the novel. Is Dorian Gray a moral novel? Or a
novel which discards all sense of morality?
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Core Secondary Reading
• Donald R. Dickson, ‘ “In a mirror that mirrors the soul”: Masks and Mirrors in Dorian
Gray,’ English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol 26.1 (1983)
Also available at http://www.oscholars.com/TO/Appendix/Library/Dickson.htm
Recommended Secondary Reading

Jonathan Freedman (ed), Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall,
1996) See especially essays by Bowlby, Cohen and Dollimore.

Peter Raby (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997)

H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Dover Publications, 1973)

Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde side: toward a genealogy of a discourse on male
sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993)

Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment
(London: Cassell, 1994)

John Stokes, Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles and Imitations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996)

Josephine Guy, Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism and Myth (Greensboro, NC:
ELT, 2006)
 Norbert Kohl, ‘Culture and Corruption: The Picture of Dorian Gray’, in Norbert Kohl,
Oscar Wilde: the Works of a Conformist Rebel, tr. D.H. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), pp.138-175.

Talia Schaffer, ‘The Origins of the Aesthetic Novel: Ouida, Wilde, and the Popular
Romance’ in Joseph Bristow, ed., Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 212-29.

Pamela Thurschwell, Chapter Two “New Forms of Outrage: Hypnotic Aesthetes and
the 1890s” in Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001)
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Block 2: Weeks 5-8
Modernism: 1922
1922 was a crucial year in the Modernist movement of the early twentieth century. In
particular it saw the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a ground-breaking work
which announced new formal possibilities for poetry. This block enables us to study this
important text in detail, alongside other significant works of modernism from the same period:
Ernest Hemingway’s genre-defining short stories and Mina Loy’s poetry. The historical
perspective will be reinforced by Michael North’s critical work Reading 1922: A Return to the
Scene of the Modern, which also forms part of your core reading for these weeks.
Week 5
Lecture: Reading The Waste Land: tradition and innovation in form
and language
Martin Ryle
Core Text
•
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (various editions).
This lecture explores how interplay between tradition and innovation was central to literary
modernism in general, and to Eliot’s poem in particular. The poem is famously allusive,
drawing on a very wide range of literary references to ground the poem in the 'tradition' that
Eliot describes in his famous essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. But this immersion in
tradition is balanced against the poem's radical innovation, its invention of a fragmentary and
difficult form that becomes central to the Modernist movement. The lecture explores these
issues in relation to the form and language of The Waste Land. It will focus closely on a
number of scenes, including the opening lines, showing how the poem’s rhythms, rhymes
and diction make numerous allusions to the long history of poetry in English.
Core Secondary Reading
•
•
T.S. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', in T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London:
Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. 13-22.
Michael North, Reading 1922 (Oxford University Press, 1999), particularly the
'Introduction', pp. 3-30 (to be read for all four weeks on 1922).
Recommended Secondary Reading
•
Lawrence Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, with Eliot's Contemporary Prose (Yale
University Press, 2005)
•
Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting the Wasteland (Yale University Press, 2005)
•
Harriet Davidson, 'Improper Desire: Reading The Waste Land', in A. David Moody,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
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•
Jean Michel Rabaté, 'Tradition and T.S. Eliot', in Moody, ed., Cambridge Companion
to T.S. Eliot
•
B.C. Southam, A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber
and Faber, 1994)
Week 6
Lecture: Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time
Sue Currell
Core Text: Hemingway, In Our Time
This lecture discusses Hemingway’s short story collection, In Our Time, first published in
1925, in the context of modernist literary innovation and techniques.
Core Secondary Reading
•
Lisa Narbeshuber. "Hemingway's In Our Time: Cubism, Conservation, and the
Suspension of Identification." The Hemingway Review 25.2 (2006): 9-28. Available via library
electronic resources, via Project MUSE.
•
Jim Barloon. "Very Short Stories: The Miniaturization of War in Hemingway's In Our
Time."The Hemingway Review 24.2 (2005): 5-17. Again available via Project MUSE.
Recommended Secondary Reading
•
Jeffrey Meyers, 'Hemingway's Primitivism and "Indian Camp", Twentieth Century
Literature,Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 211-222.
•
Moddelmog, Debra; del Gizzo, Suzanne. Ernest Hemingway in Context. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012.
•
Matthew Stewart, Modernism and tradition in Ernest Hemingway's In our time : a guide
for students and readers. Rochester, NY : Camden House 2001. Available at Library Main PH
89803 STE.
Week 7 – Reading week.
No lecture, workshop or seminar this week
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Week 8
Lecture: Mina Loy's Love Songs: On Difficulty and Intimacy
Hope Wolf
Core Text

Mina Loy, "Songs to Joannes". Copies of this text, in 1917 and 1923 versions, will be
made available in advance of the lecture on Study Direct.
This lecture addresses Loy’s long poetry sequence ‘Songs to Joannes’, as it appeared in 1923.
Lecture themes will include: an overview of Loy's reception and her place in the canon; modernist
difficulty (and Loy's place therein); opaque language and occluded meaning; poetic resistance
and its relationship to intimacy and explicitness. Some comparison of Loy and Eliot will also be
discussed.
Core Secondary Reading

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, "Little Lusts and Lucidities: Reading Mina Loy's Love Songs"
from Mina Loy: Woman and Poet.

David Ayers, "'The Waste Land', Nancy Cunard and Mina Loy." from his Modernism: A
Short Introduction (Blackwell, 2004). This is very useful for connecting Loy to Eliot.
Recommended Secondary Reading

Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body. (Chapter 4) Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1998.

Miller, Cristanne. Cultures of Modernism: Marrianne Moore, Mina Loy, & Else LaskerSchuler. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2005.

Potter, Rachel. Modernism and Democracy. (Chapter 5) Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. Eds. Rachel Potter and Suzanne Hobson. (2010).

Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Eds. Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma. The National
Poetry Foundation: Orono, Maine. 1998.
Ed. Roger Conover, Mina Loy: The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Manchester: Carcanet, 1997.
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Block 3: weeks 9-12
Love, Politics and the Erotic
The final block of Texts in Time 1 addresses texts from a broadly conceived ‘contemporary’
era, defined as from the 1960s to the present day. Here we see poetry moving on from
earlier modernism, and new experimentalism in the newly popular form of the graphic novel.
We also consider contemporary literature and art as a global phenomenon, with texts by the
American poet Frank O’Hara, as well as July’s People by South African novelist Nadine
Gordimer.
Week 9
Lecture: Intimate and anonymous love poetry: Frank O'Hara
Sam Solomon
Core Texts
•
Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems
The lecture will ask how a poem may be intimate with its readers and how we in turn may be
intimate with a poem , and what special difficulties are involved in readerly intimacy with a
love poem for a named individual or for an anonymous individual. It will reflect on the
complexity of pronouns in love poetry, particularly the second person pronoun, "you", and
ask how inhabitable the pronouns are in O'Hara's poetry, and on what imaginative conditions
we can inhabit them. I will ask what special pressures and freedoms were realised by the
progress from modernist "free verse", still a decisively metrical poetic language that valorised
versification, to the more dilatory, instinctive and improvised verse of O'Hara and his
contemporaries. I will also try to think about what the new metrical unpredictability meant for
love poems in particular.
Core Secondary Reading
•
•
Frank O'Hara, 'Personism'. In the California UP Collected Poems ed. Donald Hall
Boone, Bruce, ‘Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara’, Social Text
No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 59-92
Recommended Secondary Reading
•
Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: poet among painters. Braziller, 1977.
•
Lytle Shaw, Frank O'Hara: the poetics of coterie. University of Iowa Press, 2006.
•
Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty Macmillan, 1993.
•
Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Politics and form in postmodern poetry. CUP, 1995.
•
Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New Thames, 1962.
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•
Keston Sutherland, 'Close Writing', in Frank O'Hara Now Ed. Will Montgomery and
William Rowe. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010.
•
Pierre Reverdy, Cette émotion appelée poésie Flammarion, 1974.
•
Joe Lesueur, Digressions on S ome Poems by Frank O'Hara. Farrar Straus Giroux,
2003.
•
Daniel Kane, Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing After the New
York School. Norton, 2006.
Week 10
Lecture: Politicizing the personal: the cultural politics of
home in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People
Denise deCaires Narain
Core Text
•
July’s People, Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981) imagines South Africa caught in the interregnum
between the violent end of the apartheid regime and the establishment of a new mode of
governance. Her focus is the terse relationship between a white liberal woman and her family
who are offered refuge in the home of their servant. This lecture explores the significance of the
intimate, domestic spaces and relationships that the novel foregrounds and the implications
(with regard to race, gender and class) that this focus suggests, as well as the questions it
poses for liberal cultural politics. In an essay, Gordimer refers to herself as a “citizen of the
interregnum”; the lecture attends to the ways that Gordimer mobilizes this idea of being ‘caught
between’ at thematic and formal levels.
Core Secondary Reading
Oliver Lovesey, ‘Postcolonial apocalypse and the crisis of representation in July’s
People’ in Brendon Nicholls, Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, London, Routledge,
2011.
•
Recommended Secondary Reading

‘Texts and Contexts’, pp.7-35; Brendon Nicholls, Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People,
London, Routledge, 2011.

‘Apartheid Inequality and Postapartheid Utopia in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People’, Ali
Erritouni, Research In African Literatures, Vol 37, Issue 4, pp.68-84, 2006

‘Artist in the Interregnum: Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People’, Jeffrey F. Folks, Critique:
Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol 39, Issue 2, Winter 1998, pp. 115-126
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
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Chapter 3; Anne
McClintock; London, Routledge, 1995.
Week 11
Lecture: Queer Genealogies/Modernist Genealogies: Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home
Rachel O’Connell
Core Text
•
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006).
This lecture will look at one of the most celebrated graphic novels of recent years, Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006). This lecture will place Fun Home in the context of the relatively
recent growth in popular and scholarly interest in the graphic novel as a serious mode of
narration and representation. We will pay particular attention to the way in which this medium
has been used to narrate traumatic events in which family history is entwined with public
history. We will also explore this text’s method of combining queer family history with modernist
literary history (and modernist technique) in an explicitly demotic medium.
Core Secondary Reading
•
Hilary Chute and Mariann DeKoven, ‘Introduction: Graphic Narrative’, Modern Fiction
Studies 52:4 (Winter 2006), pp. 767-782.
•
Anne Cvetkovich, ‘In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular
Culture’, Camera Obscura 49 (17:1) 2002, pp. 106-147 Project Muse.
•
Anne Cvetkovich, ‘Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home’, WSQ:
Women’s Studies Quarterly 36: 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2008), pp. 111-128. Project
Muse
•
Ariela Freedman, ‘Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home’, Journal of
Modern Literature 32: 4 (Summer 2009), pp. 125-140.
Recommended Secondary Reading
•
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: A Kitchen Sink
Book for HarperPerennial, 1993.
Week 12
There will be no new material studied in week 12. Workshop and seminar time will be used as
decided by tutors.
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