50256 Genre Study

This advanced study of literary texts is designed to bring students into further contact with both contemporary and canonical literature. Literary theoretical concepts and categories provide means of closely reading these texts, as well as opening up sophisticated ways of thinking about literary practice. In particular, this form of literary study of relates to creative practice and composition, including the student's own creative practice in writing. At the same time critical debate within the class explores the limits and the possibilities of the literary text together with the functional operation of categories like 'author', 'genre', 'narrative', 'performance', 'subjectivity', 'meaning', 'reading', 'writing' and 'text' - including in relation to innovative formats such as hypertext or other electronic formats.

Note for 2008: This semester students study a range of inter-related pieces of fiction. Those relationships, however, are not automatically constructed via ideas of influence or re-writing. In other words, genre is seen as a framework for experiment and variation (within which similarities can be perceived), more so than as an inherited structure or authoritative mode. Questions which are opened up in the subject include: what features make these texts innovative instances in relation to the genres within which they operate? How do these pieces work as fictions? What do the modern and contemporary texts tell us about the practices of reading and the concept of readability within the contemporary moment? What do the classic texts tell us about readability across time?

In the introductory weeks, a series of contemporary and historical views of fiction is studied in relation to key critical perspectives and selected excerpts. In each of the three modules which follow, a 'classic' work of fiction is read in the company of significant (celebrated, influential, often media acknowledged) recent works. Most of these have been published since 2000, some within the last year.

Throughout the subject, students are encouraged to read and think about works which frequently subvert or radically modify narrative conventions and which do not fit readily into traditional generic classification. In module 1, Society, questions to do with the treatment of personal (biographical) and epochal (period) definitions of experience and emotion are paramount. Introductory material in the subject refines these questions and also addressed key themes in module 2. In module 2, Broken Fiction, reflexivity and the boundaries where fictional structures and non-fictional forms converge, whether in contemporary and past fiction, is one of the connectives. 3. Module 3, Crime and Punishment, further studies themes present in the two previous modules and refines them in the context of both classic and contemporary representations of truth and motive. The analysis of the chosen texts should lead students to their own innovative readings and writing. The assessed writing which comes from the subject may be either essayistic or creative writing.

Typical availability

Autumn semester, City campus