Postgraduate Course: Working Class Representations (ENLI11133)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines how working-class writers have represented themselves as well as how they have been represented by others. It pays due attention to the formal modes employed by working-class writing (realism, expressionism, surrealism, fantasy etc) across a range of genres ¿ fiction, poetry, drama and film. The course moves from the nineteenth century to the present in order to understand how class identities change over time yet it also affirms how the reconstitution of class is not synonymous with its disappearance. The course will focus on key issues such as the relationship between culture and politics, the intellectual or writer as a socially mediated figure, solidarity and individuality, social mobility, gender, voice and vernacular, the politics of representation. |
| Course description |
Week 1: Introduction; Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (Oxford Worlds Classics 2006), Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End. (Birlinn 2000).
Week 2: Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Penguin 2004)
Week 3: Alan Silitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (plus film version)
Week 4: Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey (Heinemann 1992),
John Osborne, Look Back In Anger (Faber 1987)
Week 5: Tony Harrison, Selected Poems (Penguin 2006)
Tom Leonard, Intimate Voices (Vintage 1995)
Week 6: James Kelman, A Disaffection (Vintage 1999)
Week 7: James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late (Vintage 1995)
Week 8: Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting; Trainspotting (Film version)
Week 9: Films: Dockers; My Name is Joe; Riff-Raff
Week 10: Films: Brassed Off; Billy Elliott; The Full Monty
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
| By the end of this course students will have gained a detailed knowledge of how working-class writers represent themselves and have been represented both critically and theoretically.
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Reading List
Suggested Further Reading
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Chatto and Windus 1973); Culture and Society (Penguin 1962); The Long Revolution (Penguin 1965); Keywords (Flamingo 1983); Marxism and Literature (Oxford UP 1977)
Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Merlin 1971); The Historical Novel (Merlin 1989); The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin 1962)
Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction (Northcote 1997)
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Routledge 1992)
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (Verso 1978); The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell 1990); Marxist Literary Theory (Blackwell 1996)
Cary Grossburg and Lawrence Nelson, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Macmillan 1988)
Philip Gillet, The British Working Class in Postwar Film (Manchester 1997)
Aaron Kelly, Irvine Welsh (Manchester 2005)
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | WCR |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Aaron Kelly
Tel: (0131 6)50 3071
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Sophie Bryan
Tel: (0131 6)51 1764
Email: |
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