Course Catalogue

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A concern with the everyday, paradoxically, characterises some of the most experimental literature produced over the course of the last century. The modernist literature of the start of the century, often characterised as elitist, impenetrable, or disconnected from 'ordinary' experience of the world, may at first glance seem an unlikely place to begin an exploration of the everyday. Yet preoccupation with everyday life suffuses modernist writing at the level of content; concomitant modernist innovations in style can be seen as part of a general reorientation towards, and indeed a revaluation of, the everyday and daily, informed by the discourses of psychology and sociology. This special topic will pursue the daily through a diverse range of texts form the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century - literary, philosophical, psychological, sociological - and read these texts through the burgeoning current interest in theories of the everyday.

10 x 2 hour seminars

Standard entry to Masters at College level.

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One essay of 4,000 words (80%);

One presentation of 20 minutes (20%).

The aim of this course is to illustrate the importance of the concept of the everyday in twentieth-century literature and culture and to familiarise students with those discourses that underpin the concept, as well as encourage them to read literary texts of the period in the light of this crucial aesthetic and political concept.

By the end of the module students will be able to:

1. Show  an understanding of the significance of the concept of the everyday in modern, post-modern and contemporary literature and culture.

2. show an understanding of the historical, cultural and formal specificity of different approaches to the everyday in the twentieth-century.

3. engage in further research in any of those cultural, literary and theoretical issues.

4. relate their reading to their wider work in twentieth-century literature and culture.

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.