EN 122
Modes of Reading 2008-2009
This booklet contains everything you need to know regarding practical matters for
the module Modes of Reading.
Content
This module offers an introduction to the practices of criticism. Form, genre and
literary inheritance will be among the topics addressed. The module aims to
enable students to work with a variety of critical approaches, and to develop an
informed awareness of the possibilities available to them as readers and critics.
Thematically organised lectures provide a frame of cultural reference on which
the students will draw in their close readings in seminars.
Modes of Reading is a core module for first-year undergraduates. It is taught by
one weekly lecture and one weekly seminar in Terms 1 and 2. This year, there
will also be a series of lectures on the history and key elements of the major
theories of literature and culture delivered by Prof. Thomas Docherty. All
students taking Modes of Reading are strongly urged to note the time and place
of Prof. Docherty's lectures (see below) and attend them. They will provide
students with additional and invaluable resources for Modes of Reading.
Convenors
The module is convened by Dr. Michael John Kooy (m.j.kooy@warwick.ac.uk).
The co-convenor is Dr. Cathia Jenainati (c.jenainati@warwick.ac.uk). If you have
questions, consult the website, speak to your seminar tutor, or contact the
convenor.
Teaching Times
Main Lecture: Thursday, 10-11 am, MS01 (Maths Building)
Prof. Docherty's Theory Lecture (optional but highly recommended): Term
1: Wednesday, 10-11 am, R0.21 (Ramphal Building), Term 2: Monday, 12-1 pm,
MS0.1 (Maths Building).
Seminars: Check your individual timetable
Assessment
Two unassessed essays (2,000 words) to be set by seminar tutors, due Term 1,
Weeks 5 and 9. These are formative essays and must be submitted. Students
who fail to submit either or both of the unassessed essays without good cause by
Week 5 of Term 3, will carry an overall mark of 40 for the module, regardless of
whether they achieve a higher mark in the two assessed essays.
Term 2: Assessed Essay 1 (3,500 words), weighted as 50 per cent of your
module mark; due on Monday (Week 2, Term 2), 12 January 2009, by 3pm.
Term 3: Assessed Essay 2 (3,500 words), weighted as 50 percent of your
module mark; due on Monday (Week 2, Term 3), 27 April 2009, by 3pm.
Structure
The module is taught in four units. In 2008-9, the units are: (1) Shocks and
Sympathies; (2) Nation, Culture, Place; (3) Speaking with Others; (4) The Angel
of History. More details below.
Core Reading
Students must buy the following set texts:
 Allen Ginsberg, Howl
 Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners
 Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop
 Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.
These can be purchased from the University Bookshop, or any other retailer.
As well, core reading will come from a two-volume Theory Reading Pack
containing excerpts from texts by authors ranging from Aristotle to Edward Said.
Students must buy this Theory Reading Pack from the department during the first
week of term. The Pack costs £18. Cash only will be accepted. The Packs will
be on sale at the Department Office.
It is students' responsibility to buy the Theory Reading Pack within the first week
of term. The Study Pack contains excerpts from the following texts:
 F. R. Leavis, Culture and Environment
 F. R. Leavis, Education and the University: A Sketch for an 'English
School'
 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
 Aristotle, Poetics
 Burke, On the Sublime
 Freud, ‘On Dreamwork’
 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic
 Stephen Greenblatt, 'The Touch of the Real'
 Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections
 Ranajit Guha, 'Introduction to Subaltern Studies'
 Gayatri Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'
The Theory Reading Pack also contains a number of supplementary texts which,
though not considered core reading, will nonetheless be of interest to students.
Syllabus
Term 1
Week 1
convenor)
Introduction to Modes of Reading – Dr. Michael John Kooy (module
Unit 1: Shocks and Sympathies: These four lectures address
a thread in literary criticism that perceives the process of
‘reading’ as eliciting and manipulating a state of either shock
or sympathy.
Week 2
Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’ – Dr. Emma Mason
Week 3
Aristotle and poetics (Reading Theory Pack) – Dr. Emma Mason
Week 4
Edmund Burke and the sublime (Reading Theory Pack) – Dr.
Emma Mason
Week 5
Shklovsky’s art as technique (Reading Theory Pack) – Dr. Emma
Mason
Week 6
Reading Week – no lecture or seminars
Unit 2: Nation, Culture, Place: This unit with facilitate
discussion about emplacement and literature, literary spaces,
ideologies of place/space, locations of literature/culture and
criticism.
Week 7
Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners – Dr. Pablo Mukherjee
Week 8
F. R. Leavis, from A Sketch for an "English School" and sections
from Culture and Environment (Reading Theory Pack) – Dr. Pablo Mukherjee
Week 9
Raymond Williams, from The Country and the City (Reading Theory
Pack) – Dr. Pablo Mukherjee
Week 10
Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism (Reading Theory Pack)
– Dr. Pablo Mukherjee
Term 2
Unit 3: Speaking with Others: This unit will engage with the
central organisational and methodological importance of the
hidden/absent/repressed in literature.
Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop – Dr. Christina Britzolakis
Freud, ‘On Dreamwork’ (Reading Theory Pack) – Dr. Chrsitina
Week 1:
Week 2:
Britzolakis
Week 3:
Bakhtin, from Rabelais and his World (Reading Theory Pack) – Dr.
Christina Britzolakis
Week 4:
Gilbert and Gubar, from The Madwoman in the Attic (Reading
Theory Pack) – Dr. Christina Britzolakis
Unit 4: The Angel of History: This unit will focus on the
necessity of contrapuntal/oppositional reading practices.
Week 5:
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia – Dr. Rashmi Varma
Week 6:
Reading Week – no lecture or seminars
Week 7:
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Touch of the Real’ (Reading Theory
Pack) – Dr. Rashmi Varma
Week 8:
Jerome McGann, from The Beauty of Inflections (Reading Theory
Pack) – Dr. Rashmi Varma
Week 9:
Ranajit Guha, from ‘Introduction to Subaltern Studies’ (Reading
Theory Pack) and Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ – Dr. Rashmi
Varma
Week 10:
Revision lecture – Dr. Michael John Kooy
Seminars
Individual seminar tutors will be giving students a schedule for the seminars. In
terms of content, the seminars will follow the lecture syllabus.
Additional Theory Lectures
Prof. Thomas Docherty will be offering a series of Theory Lectures. These
lectures, though optional, are highly recommended. They will give students an
introduction to important developments in literary theory, from the early twentieth
century to the present. Details are posted on the website.
‘Shocks and Sympathies’
Dr Emma Mason
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’
Aristotle and poetics
Edmund Burke and the sublime
Shklovsky’s art as technique
These four lectures address a thread in literary
criticism that perceives the process of ‘reading’ as eliciting and
manipulating a state of either shock or sympathy. As well as
providing introductory discussions to poetry (Aristotle), the
sublime (Burke) and ‘art’ (Shklovsky), the lectures will show
how these three thinkers variously aestheticize and politicize
their writings on interpretation, showing that there is no
‘natural’ way of reading any given text. Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ will
offer us a way into these questions. It is formally experimental
(based on a triadic form that shifts into breath-length
sentences that challenge the ways we ‘scan’ poetry);
stylistically disorienting (its hallucinatory feel lends itself to
frank references to sexuality which later provoked an
obscenity trial); rich in literary references (to William Blake,
Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs); politically
radical (addressing subjects like the Vietnam war, poverty,
homosexuality and race relations); and emotionally diverse
(the poem has a charged rhythm but deals also with feelings of
depression and alienation). It is also an intensely religious
poem and borrows and reworks many aspects of the epic
genre to achieve a sublime effect it simultaneously
undermines (what would it mean to have a ‘sublime’ feeling in
1955, Ginsberg asks, a period devastated by a relatively
recent awareness of the holocaust a
Vietnam War (1959-1975), producing
according to some statistics).
‘Howl’ enables us to think abo
asking us to see it in a different w
questions of perspective and interpre
the three theorists this module focuse
to defamiliarize us from our de
preconceptions through literature, s
each theorist turns to as the genre m
us to comprehend and recognize the
well as thinking. Where Aristotle a
poetry is the most powerful genre in
and reflect on emotion, Shklovsky in
the only way back into feelings that h
devastation of life and also the most
the good ‘sensation of life.’ Poetry, h
making assumptions about things
already a bit strange and so removes
of perception,’ forcing us to alw
encounter. The lectures will also dr
poetry to work through the question
‘reader,’ of texts, society and one’s co
‘Nation, Culture, Place’
Dr Pablo Mukherjee
Week 7
Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners
Week 8
F. R. Leavis, ‘A Sketch for an "English School"’ and sections from
Culture and Environment
Week 9
Raymond Williams, from The Country and the City
Week 10
Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism
In a sense, all the readings in this unit are different
responses to a certain question involving what is called
the national imaginary. The national imaginary as a term
considers how is it that people are asked to imagine
themselves and others as belonging to a status group
involving nationality.
The question is simply this: what do we mean when
we say I study English literature? Are we referring to
texts that happen to be produced in strands of English
language or do we mean texts that because of their
composition and publication somehow work to create a
national identity, a sense of belong to a particular set of
provincial interests?
What gets included or excluded when we either make
language, landscape, and national identity mean the
same thing or what happens when we disentangle them?
We begin with the powerfu
issues in Colin MacInnes’ novel
world war ‘new’ England. By
language, gender, class, immigra
make up the fabric of everyday
problematic possibilities of a ‘new
provides us with an imaginative e
assessment of ideas of national an
is in this light that we then turn to
define what makes a degree
possible. We turn look at Raymon
the blindness to issues of power in
at his new mode of reading poetry
about literature and national cultu
discusses the international, imperi
reading the English novel.
‘Speaking with Others’
Dr Christina Britzolakis
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop
Sigmund Freud, from ‘On Dreamwork’
Mikhail Bakhtin, from ‘Rabelais and His World’
Gilbert and Gubar, from The Madwoman in the Attic
Within the context of literary theory and literary
criticism, we often encounter the term ‘other’ (or
‘otherness’). This terminology has been linked with the
discourses
of
psychoanalysis,
feminism,
poststructuralism (especially in the field of linguistics) and
postcolonialism. What we classify under the concept of
"otherness" is connected to ce
exclusion through which the const
place. Otherness, then, can b
present within the self, as psyc
talking about the operation of de
desire and fantasy. At the s
‘otherness’ is attached to particular bodies that get
labelled and marked as “the Other.” In this latter context,
otherness is defined by difference, typically marked by
outward signs like race and gender. Historically,
otherness has been associated predominantly with
marginalized or subordinate groups: those who have
been defined as different by a dominant group.
Difference, then, is not an ontological given but
necessary for ethical and social relations; it is another
way of talking about relationality and conflict, within preexisting power structures. The dynamics of otherness
can be seen as part and parcel of the construction of the
subject.
To what extent can literary texts help us to imagine
otherness? Can reading be seen as an encounter with
the otherness of our own culture(s)? Are there particular
genres, or formal or aesthetic strategies, which can open
up a dialogue with what culture excludes or censors as
‘other?
In this unit, the term "otherness" will therefore be used
as a convenient means of yoking together a set of related
discussions about the operation of difference within
literature. It will be applied to the process of psychic
formation, as a dialogue between symbolic discourse and
its "other"; to the relation between men and women; and
to the interaction between different social languages in
the literary text.
We start with Angela Carter’s novel, the Magic
Toyshop and see how Carter employs a range of ideas
about
femininity,
fantasy,
intertextuality,
myth,
‘demythologizing’, performance, the relationship between
parents and children, Englishne
order to foreground the knotty pro
and relationship with ‘others’. Psy
that, owing to repression, much of
is unconscious. In the second lect
Freud’s model of this process
narrative and its mechanisms of
whether literary criticism can learn
model of dream interpretation and
of the uncanny, and its impact on l
For the linguist Bakhtin, we
ourselves when we enter languag
discourse as an intersubjective
socially and culturally significant
we enter into a complex web of
utterances which he calls dialog
distinguishes the novel as a ge
interested in the way that literatu
able to circumvent the social and
the body, and he develops the
realism’ to explore this process.
our third lecture.
Finally, we look at the impact
interpretation. Feminist critical the
relationships between gender an
identity. Feminist criticism applies
formation of literary canons and t
evaluation, e.g. via the notion of
The course extracts by Gilbert an
as an influential example of the pro
authored ‘images of women’.
‘The Angel of History’
Dr Rashmi Varma
Week 5
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Week 7
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Touch of the Real’
Week 8
Jerome McGann, from The Beauty of Inflections
Week 9
Ranajit Guha, from ‘Introduction to Subaltern Studies’ and
selections from Gayatri Spivak
How does literature capture the stuff of life? If it does
so, how is it different from other kinds of narrative that
also claim to do so, like ‘history’? What does it mean
when we say something is ‘fictional’, and others
‘historical’? Are these really two completely separate,
watertight compartments containing mutually exclusive
elements? Or do they, in reality, share features? Can
literature make claims to historical truth? Or is it a
debased kind of historical record?
Such are the
questions we investigate in this unit, questions that go to
the heart of a much more fundamental issue – what and
of what use is literature?
We begin with Hanif Kureishi’s re-imagining of a
recent, vibrant and tortured period in British history – the
1970s. Does Kureishi’s novel offer us insights that we
cannot get in historical accounts of these times? Or does
it encourage to understand that
already historical and the hist
‘literary’?
Next, we turn to
influential essay that raises these
series of ‘historical’ texts and obj
outlines what is meant by the hist
scholarship and argues that it
criticisms of insularity and irrelevan
Finally, two incisive essays from
the problematic question of co
strategies in historical narratives.
borrows literary strategies of
focalisation etc. to privilege some
do we reach stories that never di
literary
techniques
offer