Approaches to Literary Genres

Learning Outcomes

This is an optional module for the MA in English Literary Studies, taught by those contributing to the programme in a given year, and will introduce you to the key critical, theoretical, historiographical and conceptual debates surrounding the study of genre. It will emphasise the issues which have been central to current scholarship on genre, and consider how literary and cultural texts have employed, combined, and subverted the formal conventions of particular genres. Indicative topics include: horror and the gothic, the bildungsroman, allegory, romance, historical fiction, epic, satire, the picaresque, travel narratives, fantasy, science fiction. utopia, crime and detective fiction. These topics are studied across the English-speaking world, in Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, as well as Britain, Australia, and North America. Preliminary Critical Reading: Mary Chamberlain, Paul Thompson _Narrative and Genre_ Jacques Derrida 'The Law of Genre' Garin Dowd, Jeremy Strong, Lesley Stevenson, _Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism_ David Duff, _Modern Genre Theory_ John Frow, _Genre_ Fredric Jameson, _The Political Unconscious_

Teaching methods may include: •seminars involving both tutor and student led discussion; •use of internet and other electronic resources on studies in genre Learning activities include: •participation in general discussion of themes drawn from weekly reading; •oral seminar presentation; •independent reading and research; •development of techniques and conventions of visual analysis. The module will use primary materials related to the study of literary genres, e.g. literary texts, periodical literature, legal documents, fine art and popular visual images, artefacts etc. in relation to a wide range of secondary critical and historical texts drawn from literary criticism and its history, social history, ecology, the history of art, the law, and political economy. The module will explicitly raise questions about the uses of genres in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of genres. An introductory session on critical approaches to genre will be followed by sessions on the following indicative topics: genre and subjectivity; gender, genre, and sexuality; genre, property and dispossession; genres of embodiment; genres of empire and decolonization; genres of race, extractivism, and affect; genres of the post-human. In the final weeks of the module we will synthesize and review the work covered.