Literature and Languages
Current Undergraduates
Core Module Descriptions
ENG912 Texts and Contexts
Convenor: Professor Ruth Evans
(Spring 2009)
This module will extend the close reading and theoretical skills introduced in semester one, but it will also aim to situate a range of texts within their historical, socio-cultural and generic contexts.
- Genre will be scrutinised to determine how texts rely upon, manipulate and challenge existing formal and thematic conventions. In particular we will investigate the characteristics and historical development of the short story, specifically in its American context.
- Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations will be studied within both its Victorian social and cultural context, and in the context of the development and ideology of the mode of realism.
- Moving on to neo-Victorianism. Sarah Waters’ Affinity problematises questions about the historical contexts in which texts are produced, set, and consumed, and explores such issues as prisons and panopticons, as well as spiritualism, death and mourning in the Victorian world.
- We will consider how Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, explores socio-political tensions of the later twentieth century, first through a consideration of the formal contexts of language, genre and narrative form and then through cultural contexts, looking specifically at questions of feminism, nature and identity.
- There will be a series of lectures considering specific poems in the contexts of the classics, the bible, genre, and modernism.
- In the twenty-first century drama is not only the preserve of the theatre but is also to be found in film and other visual media. Quentin Tarantino’s film script of Natural Born Killers and Oliver Stone’s film both dramatise the relation between the violence prevalent in modern society and its causes. The film incorporates a number of dramatic and filmic genres into its structure, while the script provides a clear sense of the difference between ‘writing’ and its realisation in ‘performance’.
Set texts:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847) Penguin Red Classics, intro. Michael Mason (London: Penguin, 2009) ISBN: 978-0141028163
Imran Ahmad, Unimagined: A Muslim Boy Meets the West (London: Aurum, 2008) ISBN 978 1 84513 325 2
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (1395), in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edn, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (New York and London: Norton, 2005), pp. 39-67 ISBN: 0393979202
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712), in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edn, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (New York and London: Norton, 2005), pp. 604-621 ISBN: 0393979202
Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953), Penguin Modern Classics (London: Penguin, 2000) ISBN: 978-0141182551
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) Penguin Popular Classics new edn (London: Penguin, 2007) ISBN: 978-0140621723
Students will also require the following set text from ENG911: The Norton Anthology of English Poetry, 5th edition.
| ENG912 | Texts and Contexts |
|---|---|
| Module Structure: | Two lectures and one tutorial per week. |
| Pre-requisite: | None |
| Assessment: | Two essays of 2000-2250 words, each weighted 50%. |