Module description
‘Theory, Politics, and Culture after the 1960s’ invites students to consider the ways in which the investments of literary and critical theory—most centrally language, class, race, gender, and sexuality—have intersected and overlapped in relation to socio-political transformations from the 1970s to the present. Each week is organized around one or more of these intersections, which we will address though discussions of critical and literary texts and films. Topics of discussion might include: the relationship between waged and unwaged work, and the systems of gender and race that are organized around the poles of this relationship; the construction of categories that are presented as “normal”; the category of the human; the relationship between finance and representation; the politics of visibility; the relationship between aesthetics and social structure; the challenge of trying to define the social, political, and cultural characteristics of the present (and the recent past).
Assessment details
1 x 3,000 word essay (85%); KEATS reader response/discussion forum (15%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module allows level 5 students to continue studying literary and critical theory after the level 4 module "Introducing Literary Theories." It aims to build on the scholarly investments of the earlier module while introducing a set of specific historical concerns and a number of literary texts and films. The purpose of this is to allow students to develop ways of working with theory and fiction that go beyond simply applying the former to the latter, and that instead focus on the ways in which the two types of text illuminate and complexify each other. The knowledge and skills developed through this module will provide students going on to the more theory-heavy level 6 modules (for example "Critically Queer," "Twenty-First Century American Fiction," and "Literature and Media"), as well as the Dissertation, with a sound methodological basis as well as a useful body of knowledge.
Learning outcomes
- Develop the critical and analytical skills required to consider the cultural and political investments of literature, film, and critical theory produced in the period from the 1970s to the present.
- Encounter a range of literary texts and films that confront and complexify social, cultural, and political-economic issues specific to the contemporary period.
- Continue to develop their familiarity with genres of literary and critical theory, building on the compulsory level 4 module Introducing Literary Theories.
- Develop their understanding of the ways in which aesthetic and critical phenomena overlap, intersect, and transform each other, rather than existing in isolation.
Teaching pattern
One hour seminar and one hour lecture each week