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2013/14 Taught Postgraduate Module Catalogue

ENGL5347M Something rotten: Translatlantic Capitalism and the Literature of Waste 1945-present

30 creditsClass Size: 12

Module manager: Dr Andrew Warnes
Email: a.warnes@leeds.ac.uk

Taught: Semester 2 (Jan to Jun) View Timetable

Year running 2013/14

Pre-requisite qualifications

As for MA programme

Module replaces

Islands, Ghettos, Patches ENGL5751M

This module is not approved as an Elective

Objectives

Principally, to consider the moral capacities of literary representation, asking whether idealistic critics since the Victorian period have been write to consider the novel and other literary forms a vehicle for the promotion of empathy, sensitivity, and equality in modern society.

Learning outcomes
As a result of this course students will, principally, have thought carefully about the moral character of their own practices as students of literature, and will arrive at more developed positions that neither sentimentalise that literature unthinkingly nor automatically dismiss claims as to its amoral or disinterested character.

In other words, the module will I hope help them develop the kind of clearer sense of why they read and what they are trying to archive that was once more built in to English university degrees.

Skills outcomes
Masters (Taught), Postgraduate Diploma & Postgraduate Certificate students will have had the opportunity to acquire the following abilities as defined in the modules specified for the programme:
- the skills necessary to undertake a higher research degree and/or for employment in a higher capacity;
- evaluating their own achievement and that of others;
- self direction and effective decision making;
- independent learning and the ability to work in a way which ensures continuing professional development;
- to engage critically in the development of professional/disciplinary boundaries and norms.


Syllabus

In his tour de force Wasted Lives (2003), Zygmunt Bauman claims that the production of human waste—refugees, lumpen proletarians, outcasts and misfits—is an inevitable consequence of modern capitalism. Modern capitalist culture, Bauman argues, remains obsessed with novelty and obsessively consigns what was new yesterday to its burgeoning rubbish dumps; it is hardly surprising, therefore, that it should begin to treat certain kinds of people the same way, deeming them, too, disposable, “used,” or otherwise redundant. In this MA module we consider this recent sociological idea at length, and ask how it is reflected or resisted in certain key literary and cultural works produced in the UK and US since World War Two. Albeit in very different ways, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye certainly reveal a common fascination with moments when humans are treated as flotsam or rubbish, and both of them might be said to understand their own narrative practices as a kind of redemptive activity in which interior monologue and other devices recover the humanity that the plot is imperilling at every turn. But this anxious interest in human waste comes to the surface in all of the primary novels on the module, surfacing in Doris Lessing’s depictions of an inhuman bureaucracy in Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) as well as in Raymond Carver’s accounts of commodification and bankruptcy in Collected Stories (1985). In the course of the module we will also step outside literature to consider other phenomena, and particularly UK punk and postpunk’s celebration of all things rotten, in which individual artists have almost seemed to affirm the low designation Bauman critiques.

Teaching methods

Delivery typeNumberLength hoursStudent hours
Seminar102.0020.00
Private study hours280.00
Total Contact hours20.00
Total hours (100hr per 10 credits)300.00

Private study

In common with other School of English MA modules, students enrolled on Something Rotten will spent the majority of their study time pursuing private study: reading set texts, consulting emailed material, pursuing library research, writing essay drafts, and editing these before final submission.

Opportunities for Formative Feedback

Student progress will be monitored in the usual manner for School of English MA modules; the small nature of our seminars and emphasis on discussion make it possible to see how each individual is doing on a weekly basis.

In addition, however, there will be two major points in the development of the independent project at which I will see how students are doing with their coursework: in a group meeting before the halfway point, and in a one-on-one meeting that I will hold with them following their submission of the unassessed essay assignment.

Methods of assessment


Coursework
Assessment typeNotes% of formal assessment
EssayOne 4,000 word essay100.00
Total percentage (Assessment Coursework)100.00

Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated

Reading list

The reading list is available from the Library website

Last updated: 09/03/2015

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