The Contemporary

Posted on Jun 30, 2014 in Teaching | 0 comments

As Director of Birkbeck's MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture, I've been teaching the programme's first core module on "Reading the Contemporary" since 2013.

This course introduces students to a range of contemporary literary, cinematic, visual and theoretical works published since 2000, tracing some of the major developments in contemporary literatures at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Taking in poetry, film, memoir, journalism, the novel, the graphic novel, science fiction and digital culture, this course explores the meanings and characteristics of the ‘contemporary’ via a focus on categories like hybridity, performance, trauma, memory and the uncanny – terms that have been major preoccupations of cultural production in the last two decades. 

The course is broadly split into two sections, the first of which explores ‘the aesthetics of disintegration’ arguably symptomatic of developments like postcolonialism and globalization; the second explores the idea that the aesthetics of the contemporary moment might also, and simultaneously, be stalked by a number of ‘returns’: of, among others, the religious, the national, the historical, the ‘real’. In this way the course moves beyond debates about postmodernism by reading the postmodern as one among a number of conditions that shape the contemporary world. 

Course Overview:

Week 1 | Induction (CE)

Week 2 | When was the Contemporary?  (CE)

• Cloverfield (2008) (Dir. Matt Reeves)
• Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’ in What is an Apparatus? And other Essays (2009)
• Don Slater and George Ritzer, ‘Interview with Ulrick Beck,’ Journal of Consumer Culture 1.2 (2001): 261-277
• Dominic Head, ‘The Post-Consensus Renaissance?’ in The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 1-22
• Martin Haliwell, ‘Contemporary American Culture’ in American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century, ed. Martin Haliwell and Catherine Morley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 211-226

Week 3 | Retro Action (JB) 

• Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004)
• The lecture will also refer to the TV series Mad Men (2007-present), on the 1960s

Week 4 | Networks Beyond the Nation (CE)

• Hari Kunzru, Transmission (2005)
• Selections from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (2005)
• Berthold Schoene, ‘Global Noise: Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Hari Kunzru’ and ‘Coda: The Cosmopolitan Imagination’ in The Cosmopolitan Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 127-153

Week 5 | Evaporating Genres (CE)

• Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads (2003) 
• Margaret Atwood, “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia” in In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (New York: Virago, 2012), pp. 66-98
• Milena Marinkova, “Revolutionizing Pleasure in Writing: Subversive Desire and Micropolitical Affects in Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads” in Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures, ed. Lorna Burns, Birgit M. Kaiser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 181-198

Week 6 | Reading Week

Week 7 | Poetry and Speed (CW) 

• Tom Raworth, ‘Ace’ and ‘The Vein’, in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003)
• Hear Raworth reading Ace online at Pennsound http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Raworth.html or buy the Rockdrill CD at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ace-1966-1979-Rockdrill-Tom-Raworth/dp/1905001037 

Week 8 | The Aesthetic of Bookishness in the Digital Age (CE)

• Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (2007)
• N. Katherine Hayles, “Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel,” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2011) [copies will be made available via Moodle]
• Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 48, No. 4 (2013) 

Week 9 | Post-secularism after 9/11 (CE)

• Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002)
• Hent de Vries, ‘Introduction: Before, Around and Beyond the Theologico-Political’ in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006)
• John A. McClure, from Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2007) 

Week 10 | The Return of Nation (AV)

• Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (2009)

Week 11 | Modernist Inheritances and the Paradoxes of the Present (CE)

• No set reading for this session.

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To view the handbook for this module in 2014-15 please click on the link.

Image by Joe Penniston under a CC BY-NC-ND license.