c21st Theory

Posted on Feb 24, 2012 in Teaching | 0 comments

This year I've been teaching on the MA in 21st Century Literature at the University of Lincoln. One of our optional modues, "21st Century Literary Theory," has now been redesigned by Dr Lorna Burns and myself and will run in its new form in the Spring semester 2013. 

I've introduced seminars on:

• Modernist Inheritances – selections from David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (2012)

• Literary Postsecularism – selections from John A. McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007) and Andrew Tate, Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (2010). Literary case study – Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002)

• The Cosmopolitan Novel – selections from Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009) and Rachel Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006). Literary case study – Hari Kunzru, Transmission (2005) 

• Networks Beyond the Nation – selections from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)

• Posthuman Agents –  Selections from Sherryl Vint, Animal Alterity (2010) and Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (2008). Literary case study – J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003) 

Lorna is teaching sessions on theories of potentiality (Giorgio Agamben), aesthetics versus inaesthetics (Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou), violence and gender (Judith Butler, Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak), the concept of minor literatures (Gilles Deleuze, Claire Colebrook), and rethinking postcolonial theory (Peter Hallward, Benita Parry. Lorna will be using the literary case study of Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853).

We'll also be screening the fantastic documentary Examined Life (2008) (dir. Astra Taylor), which features Cornel West, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler and Kwame Anthony Appiah, amongst others, discussing philosophy whilst out and about.

Image by Pierre Metivier under a CC BY-NC license.