Core Course Lectures 2024/25
The course lecture classes offer an overview of central concepts of modern literary/cultural theory. The overview is provided in the form of a series of eight classes running throughout the first term which aims to introduce major conceptual issues and theoretical problems and show how they can be applied to the reading of literary texts, film and broader intellectual and cultural-historical contexts. Classes will be held weekly and the information is as follows:
Classes
Week 1. Sound Studies (Professor Nick Hammond)
Week 2: History and Context (Dr Martin Ruehl)
Week 3: Centres and Peripheries (Dr Stanley Bill)
Week 4. The Spatial Turn (Dr Liesbeth François)
Week 5: Ecocriticism (Dr Miranda Griffin)
Week 6: Forms (Dr Mary Franklin-Brown)
Week 7: Memory (Professor Charles Forsdick)
Week 8: Cognitive Approaches (Dr Tim Chesters)
Week 1: Sound Studies (Professor Nick Hammond)
Sound studies is an interdisciplinary approach combining methods and problematics from music, anthropology, and technology, employing ideas such as the 'soundscape', and studies of aurality and the voice, among others. Common themes explored include the relation or tension between 'natural' sound and industry, the problem of noise, and the impact of technology on sound production and consumption. In this session, the relationship between sight and sound will first be explored as well as certain theories of sound, before we look at the role of Sound Studies within our discipline.
Pre-seminar reading:
Labelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: sound culture and everyday life (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), introduction
Leighton, Angela, Hearing Things: the work of sound in literature (New Haven: Harvard UP, 2018), chapter 1
Nancy, Jean-Luc, À l’écoute (Paris: Galilée, 2002); Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007)
Schafer, Murray, The Soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994, first published 1977), introduction
Further reading:
Connor, Steven, Beyond Words: sobs, hums, stutters and other vocalizations (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), chapter 1
Hammond, Nicholas, The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2019)
Hamilton, Tom, and Hammond, Nicholas, eds, Soundscapes, Early Modern French Studies vol. 41 no. 1 (June 2019)
Kay, Sarah, and Noudelmann, François, eds, Soundings and Soundscapes, Paragraph vol. 41 no, 1 (March 2018)
Week 2: History and Context (Dr Martin Ruehl)
In literary criticism, “history” is often considered the opposite of “theory”. Many scholars in the field take Derrida’s “il n’y a pas d’hors-texte” (“there is no outside-text”) as an injunction to ignore the historical reality in which a work of literature or philosophy was produced and received. History and context, for them, are part of the “transcendental signified” supposedly debunked by (poststructuralist) theory. Even the less theoretically minded frequently treat history as little more than “background” and draw on it selectively, when it suits their interpretive purpose.
My aim in this lecture is to break down the dichotomies – textual foreground/historical/background, close reading/contextual analysis, etc. – that define so much literary and cultural analysis and to make a case for the inevitable, inextricable historicity of literature. I will do so by examining the work of several theorists who have elevated context to “co-text” and highlighted the extent to which the written word is historically situated, mediated, constituted. These theorists have emphasized both the “pastness” and the otherness of seemingly timeless, canonical, universally relevant works. Drawing on Marx as well as Nietzsche, they have explored the ways in which specific material conditions, power relations, and intellectual debates shape the meaning of a text.
My lecture will address the following questions: What does it mean to read a text historically or “in context”? What particular methods does such a reading require? What conceptions of textuality and historicality inform it? What are the heuristic gains of such an apporach? What are its potential pitfalls, e.g., does it run the risk of reducing complex works of literature or philosophy to the material conditions in which their authors were working, to mere ideological statements, or tokens of the zeitgeist? Does historicization render a text less relevant to the present?
Compulsory reading
Lionel Gossman, “History and the Study of Literature”, Profession 94 (1994), pp. 26-33.
Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!”, New Literary History 42, 4 (Autumn 2011), pp. 573-591
Further reading
Dominick LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts”, History & Theory 19, 3 (1980), pp. 245-276.
John Toews, “Intellectual History after the linguistic turn: the autonomy of meaning and the irreducibility of experience”, American Historical Review 92 (1987), pp. 879-907.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977), Introduction & Section I (“Basic Concepts”), pp. 1-75.
Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”, in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. I: Regarding Method (2002), ch. 4, pp. 57-90.
David Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature”, The American Historical Review 94, 3 (June 1989), pp. 581-609.
Week 3: Centres and Peripheries (Dr Stanley Bill)
This lecture will look at various understandings of ‘centres’, ‘peripheries’ and ‘semi-peripheries’ in literature and culture. It will present multiple theories of world or global literature, examining the ways in which literary spheres (not defined in any hermetically closed way) in different cultural and geographical locations interact with and influence one another. In doing so, it will also open questions of hierarchies and power relations, discussing the connections between political or economic power and cultural forms of hegemony. The theoretical framework for these discussions will partly overlap with key questions from postcolonial theory, including a focus on concepts such as ‘mimicry’ and ‘hybridity’. The lecture will also pay close attention to translation. Illustrative examples of ‘center-periphery/semi-periphery’ relations in literary and cultural history will come from Central and Eastern Europe – in particular, from Poland and Russia.
Pre-seminar reading
Casanova, Pascale. “Literature as a World,” in New Left Review 31 (Jan/Feb 2005): 71-90.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 499-528.
Kundera, Milan. “Die Weltliteratur,” in The New Yorker (January 8, 2007).
Further reading
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters, translated by Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Domínguez, César, Giovanna Di Rosario, and Matteo Ciastellardi. “On Writing a Comparative Literary History: Delocalizing Minor Literatures in European Languages in the Age of ‘Big Data’.” Arcadia: International Journal for Literary Studies 53.2 (2018): 278-307.
Ferguson, Frances. “Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text.” New Literary History 39.3 (2008): 657-684.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2016).
Pettersson, Anders. “Transcultural Literary History: Beyond Constricting Notions of World Literature.” New Literary History 39.3 (2008): 463-479.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literature (London: Continuum, 2008).
Tihanov, Galin. “Do ‘Minor Literatures’ Still Exist? The Fortunes of a Concept in the Changing Framework of Literary History,” in Reexamining the National-Philological Legacy: Quest for a New Paradigm?, edited by Vladimir Viti (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 169-190.
Tuckerová, Veronika. “The Archeology of Minor Literature: Towards the Concept of the Ultraminor.” Journal of World Literature 2.4 (2017): 433-453.
Vandebosch, Dagmar, and Theo D’haen, eds. Literary Internationalism(s) (Leiden, Boston: Brill, Rodopi, 2018).
Veit, Walter F. “Globalization and Literary History, or Rethinking Comparative Literary History – Globally.” New Literary History 39.3 (2008): 415-435.
White, Hayden. “‘With No Particular Place to Go’: Literary History in the Age of the Global Picture.” New Literary History 39.3 (2008): 727-745.
Week 4. The Spatial Turn (Dr Liesbeth François)
This session explores the main tenets and implications of the spatial turn in the humanities, as well as the way in which they have shaped the subdiscipline of geocriticism in literary studies. The ‘spatial turn’ refers to a paradigm shift in social and cultural theory throughout the second half of the twentieth century, which was prepared by philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, and consolidated through the work of several thinkers within the domain of human geography (Edward Soja, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Derek Gregory). It implied a recalibration that problematised the intellectual predominance of time and historicity as the explaining factors of social and cultural processes and advocated, instead, a heightened attention towards their spatial dimensions. However, this change in perspective also hinges on a thorough redefinition of the concept of space itself: rather than a blank canvas or a neutral container, it is conceptualised as a complex and dynamic medium through which power relations fundamentally shape social life – in line with the Marxist inspiration of many of these approaches, space holds a little-acknowledged but crucial strategic importance for the expansion of capital and becomes, in this sense, one of the most important battlegrounds for social change. Although this paradigm shift concerns space in its most general and transhistorical sense, contemporary processes such as accelerated globalisation and time-space compression played a key role in the emergence of this renewed scrutiny. The aforementioned insights are central to a set of theoretical and critical practices that have been brought together, mainly through the work of Bertrand Westphal and Robert T. Tally, under the common denominator of ‘geocriticism’. Geocriticism focuses on how spatiality shapes literary practices, and centrally relies on these critical approaches to examine the social relations that resonate in and emerge through the interface between text and world. In the session, we will address the ideas and debates that have arisen from these evolutions, as well as some of their ramifications, particularly those highlighting the mobile, urban, volumetric and geological aspects of space
Pre-Seminar Reading
Lefebvre, Henri, ‘Plan of the Present Work’, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [1974]), pp. 1-67.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’, A Thousand Plateaux (University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), pp. 474-501
Tally, Robert, ‘Introducing Geocriticism’ and ‘Geocritical Situations’, Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 2019), pp. 36-71
Further reading
Augé, Marc, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2008 [1992])
Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984 [1980])
García Canclini, Néstor, Imagined Globalization (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2014 [1999])
Gregory, Derek, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces* (1967)’, in Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 13–3
---------------, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1991
Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991
Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [1974])
----------------, ‘Right to the City’, in Writings on Cities, ed. by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford; Malden: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 63–18
Massey, Doreen, For Space (London: Sage, 2005)
Miller, Joseph Hillis, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995
Soja, Edward W., Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989)
-------------------, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Ángeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)
Tally Jr., Robert, ed., Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave, 2011
-----------------, Spatiality (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2013
-----------------, Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 2019
Thrift, Nigel, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2008
West-Pavlov, Russell, Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009
Westphal, Bertrand, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2014
----------------, The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place, and Maps (New York: Palgrave, 2013)
Week 5: Ecocriticism (Dr Miranda Griffin)
What does it mean to think like a mountain? Or to see the world from a mushroom’s point of view? Ecocriticism is the term given to a collection of theoretical and creative work which advocate a perspective which encompasses the more-than-human: it overlaps and touches on approaches in philosophy (Object Oriented Ontology – OOO); science studies and anthropology (Actor Network Theory); gender studies (ecofeminism); and the environmental humanities (new materialism). What these approaches have in common is the decentring of the human from any hierarchy of ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, and ethics. Yet, in the Anthropocene era, we cannot ignore the responsibilities of humans in relation to our environment, neither can we claim that all humans are equally responsible for – or equally harmed by – the climate crisis. In the lecture, we will explore the ways in which creative and critical work in the arts and humanities can help to shape the stories, critiques, and perspectives needed to face the future of our environment, and of our place within it. Ecocriticism, in other words, helps us to ask vital questions about how life comes to matter.
Preparatory reading
Stephanie Foote and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Climate Change / Changing Climates” in The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie Foote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 1-10.
Astrida Neimanis, “Embodying Water: Feminist Phenomenology for Posthuman Worlds” in Bodies Of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 27-64.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Arts of Noticing”, in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 11-34.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Asters and Goldenrod”, in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 39-47.
Further reading
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Rachel L. Carson, Silent Spring (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965)
Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham : Duke University Press, 2016)
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (ed.) Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2013).
Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017)
Aldo Leopold, “Thinking Like a Mountain”, in A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 129-132.
Week 6: Forms (Dr Mary Franklin Brown)
Recent decades have seen a new interest in literary form. Poets of the later twentieth century renewed the practice of traditional poetic forms, making the villanelle, the sestina, and the sonnet resonate new concerns with politics and the present. In response, beginning in the 1990s scholars of English and American literature worked to correct at once the blindness to form that had marked some new historicist and psychoanalytic criticism, and the failure of earlier formalists (the Russian Formalists, the American New Critics) to fully theorise the relation between form and the world (history, politics) or form’s ethical charges. The body of scholarship published to date has demonstrated the way close reading allied with careful attention to questions of history, politics, or ethics can illuminate literary texts. But it is surprisingly opaque or contradictory when it comes to the central term. What is form? Or, better: why does it seem so self-evident yet prove so elusive? If we cannot agree what it is, how can we define its relation to the world outside the text?
The lecture will address these questions through close analysis of art from the Middle Ages. It will examine first a medieval Latin text (translations provided) in a mixed form (prose/poetry) that recounts how prime matter was shaped to make the world. An analogous act of shaping matter produced the lecture’s second object of analysis: a palace floor of terra cotta tiles that recounts the story of Tristan. The final object will be a set of chess pieces, carved from deer antler into the ‘abstract’ forms adopted from Islamic models. The lecture will therefore push New Formalist criticism beyond the modern Anglophone canon to which is has usually been limited, to consider the literature and visual media of another language and time.
The session will be divided between lecture and discussion. Students should complete all the ‘Preliminary reading’ and bring copies (or downloaded electronic versions) with them for ease of reference.
Preliminary reading
Students should read all three of the following:
Leighton, Angela, ‘Form’s Matter: A Retrospective’, in On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1–29
Kramnick, Jonathan, and Anahid Nersessian, ‘Form and Explanation’, Critical Inquiry, 43.3 (2017), 650–69, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/691017
Lehman, Robert S., ‘Formalism, Mere Form, and Judgment’, New Literary History, 48.2 (2017), 245–63
And each student should choose one of the following books and read the extracts indicated:
Eyers, Tom, ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1–11 only) and ‘Francis Ponge, Jean Cavaillès, and the Vexed Relation between Word and World’, in Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), pp. 1–11 and 57–94
Kornbluh, Anna, ‘The Order of Forms: Mathematic, Aesthetic, and Political Formalisms’ and ‘Symbolic Logic on the Social Plane of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, in The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), pp. 1–29 and 104–21
Strand, Mark, and Eavan Boland, eds, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (New York: Norton, 2000), ‘At a glance’, ‘History of the Form’, and ‘Contemporary Context’ for the Villanelle, the Sestina, and the Sonnet, pp. 5–8, 21–24, and 55–58
In addition, please read the following poems:
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’ (villanelle, 1979), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art
Xochiquetzal Candelaria, ‘Between the House and the Hill’ (villanelle, 2011), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56978/between-the-house-and-the-hill
Billy Ramsell, ‘Sound’ (villanelle, 2015), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58302/sound
Lilace Mellin Guignard, ‘Lullaby in Fracktown’ (villanelle, 2016), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58649/lullaby-in-fracktown
David Ferry, ‘The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People’ (sestina, 1999), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43395/the-guest-ellen-at-the-supper-for-street-people
Frank Bidart, ‘If See No End In Is’ (sestina, 2007), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49826/if-see-no-end-in-is
Louise Bogan, Sonnet (‘Since you would claim the sources of my thought’, 1923), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148799/sonnet-5c1a797e31fb8
Roy Fuller, Sonnet (‘The crumbled rock of London is dripping under’, 1939), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=22457
Maxwell Bodenheim, Sonnet (‘His first time on the picket-line, he fixed’, 1940), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=22523
K. Ramanujan, Sonnet (‘Time moves in and out of me’, 1994), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39000
For further exploration
Erlich, Victor, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1955)
Eyers, Tom, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017)
Hollander, John, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971)
———, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972)
Johnson, Eleanor, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Kornbluh, Anna, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019)
Leighton, Angela, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Levine, Caroline, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)
Steiner, Peter, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984)
Thompson, Ewa M., Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971)
Wasser, Audrey, The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)
Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)
Wolfson, Susan J., Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
Week 7. Memory (Professor Charles Forsdick)
Memory study has emerged over the past three decades as a cross-disciplinary area that draws on a range of fields including history, anthropology, philosophy and psychology. Rooted in contemporary political concerns (and notably the tendency of state-endorsed memory to project exclusive narratives of the past), the area also plays an increasingly important role in literary and cultural analysis as creative artefacts are themselves acknowledged as reflections of the ways in which societies represent and process the past. Central to the field of memory studies is the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose analyses of collective memory suggested that narratives of the past are not individual phenomena but should be understood instead as socially constructed and transmitted from generation to generation. Halbwachs’s approach came under increased pressure in the later twentieth century when French historian Pierre Nora – through the concept of the ‘lieu de mémoire’ or ‘realm of memory’ – identified a fragmentation of traditional practices of commemoration and suggested the need to identify objects, sites or phenomena around which memory nevertheless continued to crystalize. The session takes Nora’s intervention as a starting point and invites a reflection on the ways in which a theory developed in the specific national niche of the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 has achieved a broader applicability and translatability. It offers an opportunity to critique Nora’s perpetuation of a national memory that deliberately ignores the afterlives of both slavery and colonialism and posits in its place the need to identify modes of remembering that are actively transnational, diasporic or ‘travelling’, in that way reflecting traces of multiple histories and foregrounding their cross-cultural entanglements. The lecture outlines also a series of alternative models of memory – palimpsestic, multidirectional, agonistic… – that provide ways of understanding the contemporary crisis in coming to terms with the past, and also offer tools for studying the dynamics of memory in a range of cultural artefacts. Exploring concepts such as the ‘memory-trace’ (proposed by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau), it suggests means of recovering different narratives of the past that defy official prescription and permit alterative voices to emerge. The session concludes with a focus on debates regarding the decolonization of memory practices, suggesting that alternative paradigms of remembering are emerging across scholarship and creative practices from the Global South. There will be an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the material studied for literary and cultural analysis, e.g., through consideration of selected passages from W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (London: New Directions Books, 1998).
Preliminary reading
Erll, Astrid, ‘Travelling memory.’ Parallax, vol. 17, no. 4, 2011, pp. 4–18.
Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, no. 26, 1989, pp. 7–24.
Van Der Rede, Lauren, and Aidan Erasmus, ‘Eddies and Entanglements: Africa and the Global Mnemoscape’, in J.-H. Lim and E. Rosenhaft (eds.), Mnemonic Solidarity, Entangled Memories in the Global South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp.105-29.
Further reading
Achille, Etienne, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno, eds. Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020)
Bull, Anna Cento, and Hans Lauge Hansen. ‘On agonistic memory.’ Memory Studies, vol. 9, no. 4, 2016, pp. 390–404.
Chamoiseau, Patrick, French Guiana: Memory-Traces of the Penal Colony, trans. Matt Reeck (Middletown, CONN: Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
Forsdick, Charles, James Mark, and Eva Spišiaková. ‘Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation: How We Remember in the Twenty-First Century.’ Modern Languages Open, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.342
Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory.’ European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, 2002, pp. 87–106
Lim, J.-H. and Eve Rosenhaft (eds.), Mnemonic Solidarity, Entangled Memories in the Global South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009)
Rothberg, Michael, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman (eds), ‘Nœuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture.’ Special issue, Yale French Studies, no. 118–119, 2010
Silverman, Max, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction (New York: Berghahn, 2015)
Stoler, Ann Laura, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)
Wüstenberg, Jenny. ‘Locating Transnational Memory.’ International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 32, 2019, pp. 371–82
Week 8: Cognitive Approaches (Dr Timothy Chesters)
The term ‘cognitive approaches’ refers to a relatively new area of literary critical enquiry, which draws inspiration from the cognitive and affective sciences. The lecture class will provide an overview of this rapidly-emerging field, and will consider both the opportunities and the challenges presented by interdisciplinary work. First, we shall examine the formative influences, from the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in cognitive linguistics. We will also seek to differentiate between the various approaches to cognition which co-exist, at times uneasily, in the broader scientific field. In a second step, we will think together about how insights from linguistics, psychology and neuroscience can and have stimulated outstanding literary analysis.
Pre-seminar reading
Cave, Terence: Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 1-31.
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark: Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 3-22.
Menary, Richard: ‘Introduction to the special issue on 4E cognition’, in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (2010), 459-63.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Part Two, ‘The World as Perceived’, chapter 1: ‘Sense Experience’ (any edition).
Zunshine, Lisa: ‘Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies’, in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 1-10.
Further reading
Bolens, Guillemette: The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
Chesters, Timothy: ‘Social Cognition: A Literary Perspective’, in Paragraph 37.1 (2014), special number: ‘Reading Literature Cognitively’, ed. by Terence Cave, 62-78.
Clark, Andy: Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Damasio, Antonio: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Vintage, 2006).
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark: Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Lyne, Raphael: Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Malabou, Catherine: Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, translated with an introduction by Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Shopin, Pavlo: ‘Metaphorical Conceptualization of Injurious and Injured Language in Herta Müller’, in Modern Language Review 111.4 (2016), 1068-84.
