Module description
Experimental or ‘avant-garde’ writing is often counterposed to writing that emphasizes voice, experience and identity. When we read more carefully, however, this distinction begins to break down. Through poetry, new narrative writing, manifestos and memoir, this module asks what subversive, ‘difficult’, or oppositional literatures can tell us about the lived categories of race and gender. Exploring the relationships between literary form and subjectivity, between abstract systemic forces and our concrete lived experiences of the world, we will consider how contemporary writers have turned to experimental techniques to channel modes of solidarity, joy and refusal, and to make legible forms of gendered and racial violence. In this way, literary experimentalisms have also provided crucial tools for anti-racist and feminist critique. But what makes a literary text experimental? What does experimental writing have to say about class? And what does it mean to ‘queer’ a text? Asking these and other questions, we will consider what the literary critic Anthony Reed calls ‘literature’s means of expanding the domain of the intelligible and thinkable’.
This module will provide students with the opportunity to produce their own piece of writing and accompanying critical commentary reflecting on their practice, or if they prefer, to write a 2,000-word critical commentary on a single text drawn from the syllabus.
Assessment details
Critical-creative portfolio OR 2,000 word critical commentary (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module introduces Level 4 students to a wide range of ‘minor’ and para-canonical literature. By the end of the semester, students will be able to confidently read and work with formally and conceptually challenging contemporary texts. In particular, they will be able to identify what is resistant, oppositional or subversive in experimental literary texts, not only in terms of the formal techniques and strategies these texts employ, but in terms of how such techniques speak to histories of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. They will have an awareness of how the global literary marketplace shapes what we read and how we read it, and an ability to reflect critically on dominant conceptions of canonicity and what constitutes the ‘literary’.
Learning outcomes
Over the course of this module, students will:
- Encounter a range of approaches to experimental literary practices and learn methods and strategies for reading unconventional, 'difficult', or 'avant-garde' texts.
- Explore ways in which contemporary literature acts as social commentary and/or enacts critique.
- Draw links between literary experimentalisms in racialized and/or feminized literatures and critical approaches drawn from gender studies, critical race studies, queer theory, Marxism and poststructuralism.
- Develop understandings of canon-formation, cultural distinctions and hierarchies through the study of para-canonical texts.
- Develop skills in linking close readings of literary texts with the historical conditions in which these texts are produced, and a critical understanding of the creative economy in which they circulate.
Teaching pattern
1x1 hour lecture and 1x1 hour seminar per week.