Undergraduate Course: Reality Hunger: Image and Appetite in Contemporary Fiction (ENLI10401)
Course Outline
School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
Summary | The module will offer a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary literature through the framework of appetite, desire, and abjection. Appetite and artistry are closely linked in literary explorations, as Kafka's famously starving artist attests. On this course we'll look at a number of hunger artists, investigating bodily, sexual, and intellectual appetites which we explore here particularly in a post-#MeToo moment against questions of authority, consent, and power within the framework of desire.
The course is also intended to introduce and interrogate the construction of the contemporary and to follow shifts in literary schools and critical approaches over the last twenty years, where our starting point for conceptualising 'the contemporary' is the twenty-first century. Following the work of theorists such as Peter Boxall, Roger Eaglestone, and Rachel Carroll we will ask what it means to cultivate a contemporary sensibility or a sense of the contemporary and will explore questions of appearance, image, affect, and experiment. |
Course description |
This course is designed to introduce students to the complications of periodising the contemporary using intimate frameworks to investigate questions of power, authority, and exchange. The module enables students to approach the legacy of theory in contemporary literature across diverse forms and to explore efforts to renew the reader-author contract in post-1990s literature. Students will be introduced to a range of theoretical schools such as affect theory, image fiction, New Sincerity, neoliberalism (as a mode of literary periodisation), and conceptual writing. Students who complete this course successfully will develop a knowledge and understanding of a range and variety of contemporary writing in a wide context considering an expansive model of 'contemporariness' over a nation-state based framework.
Students will be asked to read both literary and critical material each week. The course requires two pieces of written work: one essay to be completed during term-time and one essay to be written during the exam period. Written feedback will be provided on each element of assessment, and further oral follow-up feedback from the tutor will be available for anyone who would like it.
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Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Construct original, clear and coherent arguments about the way in which contemporary literature explores the relationship between late capitalism and questions of desire, consent, and embodiment.
- Analyse literary texts using recognised methods of literary criticism to substantiate and illustrate those arguments.
- Evaluate and assess ideas from works of secondary criticism in order to bring them to bear on their own analyses of contemporary literature whilst developing a clear understanding of the scope and scale of critical responses to the question of the ¿contemporary¿ in the twenty-first century.
- Examine literary texts for evidence of new innovations in contemporary fiction, and illustrate their findings with examples from course materials.
- Present the results of research undertaken individually and as part of a small group, respond critically to such research undertaken by others, and critically evaluate the importance of such material for an understanding of the chief themes of the course.
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Learning Resources
Section One: On Being in the Text
What A Boy Wants
Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist (1922)
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
Authority, Appetite, Autofiction
Chris Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia (2000)
Celebrity and Self-Sacrifice
Jennifer Egan, Look at Me (2001)
Telling the Self
Roxane Gay, Hunger (2017)
Intimate Knowledge
Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart (2017)
Section Two: It's Not What It Looks Like
Plastic Needs
Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015)
I. Really. Prefer. Roses.
Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister the Serial Killer (2019)
Slender Means
Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018)
Wanting Nothing
Anna Burns, Milkman (2018)
The Capaciousness of Desire
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015) |
Additional Information
Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
Keywords | Contemporary,conceptual,image,appetite,affect |
Contacts
Course organiser | Dr Patricia Malone
Tel: (0 131 6)50 8618
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Kara McCormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: |
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