Course title: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary British Prose Fiction 2
Neptun code: BTMTAN205
Institute hosting the course: Institute of Modern Philology
Course type: Compulsory
Course coordinator: Éva Pataki (part-time instructor)
Optimal semester: 1
Preconditions: No. of lessons/week: 2
Requirements of accomplishment: signature, exam
Credits: 2
Course format: part-time
Course objectives:
This module introduces you to the general development of British fiction in the 1970s and
1980s. The course aims to illustrate a variety of thematic, stylistic and linguistic concerns of
prose fiction for a better understanding of the tradition-innovation dichotomy characterising
the post-war novel. It will shed light on the complex relationship of history and the novel, and
deal with the most prominent postmodern and postcolonial authors of the period. The course
will encourage students to explore the period further and open up their own perspectives to
other texts and art works.
Detailed course programme:
Week 1 – 20/02
Introduction: Background, terms and definitions
Assignment: Connor 1-43
Week 2 – 27/02
Outside In 1: Colin MacInnes, Hanif Kureishi, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro
Assignment: Connor 83-112
The Remains of the Day (1993, dir. James Ivory)
Week 3 – 06/03
Outside In 2: Salman Rushdie
Assignment: Connor 112-27; Bradbury 418-22; Acheson 95-105
excerpt from Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989)
Week 4 – 13/03
Histories: Peter Ackroyd, John Fowles, A.S. Byatt
Assignment: Connor 128-65
Possession (2002, dir. Neil LaBute)
Week 5 – 20/03
Origins and Revisions: Emma Tennant, Marina Werner, J.M. Coetzee
Assignment: Connor 166-98
Coetzee’s Foe (1987)
Week 6 – 27/03
Endings and Living On: Anthony Burgess, Russell Hoban, Doris Lessing, Julian
Barnes
Assignment: Connor 199-245
Barnes’s ‘The Survivor’ (A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters 1989)
Week 7 – 10/04
Summary and Revision
Assignment: Bradbury 335-448 (Chapter 5 and 6)
Course requirements:
Below please find a list of the compulsory texts as well as a bibliography of recommended
readings. Moreover, you will be able to access and download most of the primary sources
from the course homepage. It is strongly advised that you regularly visit the course homepage,
where you will also find updated links to relevant articles, criticism, as well as weekly study
questions to work on. The online material as well as the secondary reading will be regarded as
part of the course material.
Evaluation:
Assessment will be based on weekly take-home tasks (study questions) and an exam. More
than two missed take-home tasks may result in denying your signature at the end of the
course. Please send your answers to the study questions by 10 April to
vicapataki@yahoo.com
Compulsory literature:
Acheson, James, and Sarah C.E. Ross, eds. The Contemporary British Novel since 1980.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005. Print.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. London: Penguin, 1993. Print.
Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History 1950-1995. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Recommended literature:
Caserio, Robert L., ed. A Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
Gąsiorek, Andrzej. Post-War British Fiction. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Print.
Lodge, David. Consciousness and the Novel. London: Secker & Warburg, 2002. Print.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Print.
Morrison, Jago. Contemporary Fiction. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Shaffer, Brian W. Reading the Novel in English 1950-2000. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. Print.
Waugh, Patricia and Lynne Pearce, ed. Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism.
London: Edward Arnold, 1992. Print.
Williams, Linda R., ed. The Twentieth Century: A Guide to Literature from 1900 to the
Present Day. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Print.
http://www.mfi.uni-miskolc.hu/angol/index.php/staff/217-pataki-eva