Contemporary British Writing: the Individual and Community
(Lit 569: Special Topics I)
Winter Semester 2016-2017
Instructor: Dr. Lydia-EfthymiaRoupakia
Seminar Outline
Seminar 1: Introduction
Seminar 2: Histories: situating our discussion
Seminar 3: Community boundaries, gender politics and beyond
Seminar 4: Rethinking feminist political togetherness
Seminar 5: Multiculturalism and question of belonging: liberals vs communitarians
Seminar 6: Against multiculturalism
Seminar 7: From race to faith: postsecularism and religious identity
Seminar 8: Globalization and/or togetherness (I)
Seminar 9: Globalization and/or togetherness (II)
Seminar 10: Posthumanist dystopias
Seminar 11: Affective citizenship
Seminar 12: Expanding our areas of exploration
Seminar 13: Presentation day
Overview of the module:
This course will explore contemporary British writing (late 1980s to the present) with a particular focus on the way the selected authors and thinkers have approached the slippery relationship between the individual and community. Drawing on approaches to individuality and social identity developed in the disciplines of political theory, cultural criticism and postcolonial studies, students will think critically about the relationship between the self and community. Revisions of belonging in the works of Jeanette Winterson, Monica Ali, HanifKureishi, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others, will be discussed against the backdrop of other transformations, such as new approaches to postmodernity, the impact of multiculturalism and religious discourses, shifting gender relationships and the speed of globalization.
Module Content
Week 1: Introduction
Introduction to the course, its aims and objectives.
Week 2: Histories: Situating our discussion
This seminar will set the historical, literary and cultural background to the questions and issues that will be examined closely during the following weeks. The legacies of modernism, the non-conformism of postmodernism, and the relationship between British social and literary history will be explored. Finally, Alain Touraine’s seminal work Can We Live Together will set the tone of our philosophical explorations of the relationship between the individual and community.
Week 3: Community boundaries, gender politics and beyond
We will begin our exploration of the interplay between individual and community by paying closer attention to Jeanette Winterson’s attempt to voice the self against communal constrictions and the normalization of gendered identities. We will discuss the ways in which insights from postmodern or poststructuralist thought were useful for feminist thinkers and writers who sought to challenge received understandings of the nature of subjectivity. It will also be pointed out, however, that poststructuralism has been questioned as a useful framework by feminists.
Week 4: Rethinking feminist political togetherness
This week we will examine efforts to replace the much-criticized notion of feminist politics based on women’s identity with more nuanced visions of the feminist “we”. We will discuss both the theoretical challenge of conceptualizing political commonality in a non-essentializing manner that reconciles community and difference, and the way British artists (MeeraSyal in particular) have voiced or addressed the challenge of building connections among women across interests, difference and origins.
Week 5: Multiculturalism and question of belonging: liberals vs communitarians
During this session we will discuss multiculturalism, both as a reality of the world we live in, and as a policy. The relationship between the individual and community will once again be at the forefront of our concerns, as will the persistent problem of conceiving agency against the claims of social embeddedness. Students will be introduced to the liberal vs communitarian debate and will be encouraged to use these theoretical ideas as a point of entry into the literary text to be studied this week: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
Week 6: Against multiculturalism
This week we will consider the growing skepticism surrounding multiculturalism and its liberal approach to community. The 1990s were marked by a tendency to criticize multicultural models that treated ethnic minorities as representative of bounded collectives. Rather, there was a shift in favor of more individual modes of inclusion: ie. cultural difference was appreciated as an individual trait. We will read HanifKureishi’sThe Buddha of Suburbia and we will discuss his approach to communal ties, paying particular attention to his irreverent style and the theatricality of his writing.
Week 7:From race to faith: postsecularism and religious identity
Is ‘faith’ the new ‘race’? Western liberal ideals, with their emphasis on autonomy and instrumental reason, are usually treated as incompatible with the more communitarian values of non-western forms of society. In the way that the fundamentalist recreates the West as a godless, materialistic space of sexual immorality, Western cultural racism constructs ‘belief’ as a dangerous, mad and criminal state of mind. We will read Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, think about the postsecular turn in political and literary studies and will grapple with the questions raised by various forms of ‘fundamentalism.’
Week 8: Globalization and/or togetherness (I)
Globalization is slowly and partially erasing borders. Determining what is domestic or international, in or out, here or there, is becoming increasingly difficult and unnecessary. We will read Appadurai's paper, which draws on Benedict Anderson's work on imagined communities, and we will reflect on Appadurai's attempt to theorize how communies are constructed transnationally today. This seminar will focus attention on Ian McEwan's novel Saturday and discuss how the possibility of living together has been challenged (or not) by the climate of fear that has attended the global war on terror. The possibility of insulating oneself against world’s concerns will be brought to the table, as it is one of the questions underlying McEwan’s novel.
Week 9: Globalization and/or togetherness (II)
This week the relationship between the individual and (global) community will be further probed through reference to the work of thinkers such as Jean Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben. We will discuss these theorists and think about whether their work may offer alternative ways of entry into the novels by Kureishi and McEwan we studied in previous weeks.
Week 10: Posthumanist dystopias
The 21st century was envisioned as “the biotech century” by Jeremy Rifkin (1998). Genetic science today promises to complicate the ways in which we approach difference and equality, and by extension community and togetherness. In previous weeks we inquired into the claims that social identities (i.e race, gender, sexuality, religious identity etc) stake on conceptions of community and belonging. This week we will explore some of the ways in which Kazuo Ishiguro represents the claims that genetic identity as a category of social identity may stake in future societies on the very right of particular kinds of people to lead a life. Drawing on Ahmed’s understanding on the cultural politics of emotion, we will read Never Let me Go and discuss how the characters’ appreciation of self and difference in shaped by the affective responses of those that surround them. We will further discuss the novel in the context of posthumanist thought on the commodification of the category ‘human’ under global capitalism.
Week 11: Affective Citizenship
In his study Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State Michael Herzfeld claims that “to think affect is to think the social, and nothing is more important right now” (2005, 25). The growing importance of affective flows mark a change of interest away from the terrain of the personal (with its focus on the autonomous individual as separate from others) to the intimate (that is, to the co-constitutions of subjectivity, image, word, and world and to a self developing through relation). We will reflect on the importance of affect in reformulations of community and belonging in modernity. We will draw on the literary texts studies throughout the semester to illustrate positions and arguments.
Week 12: Expanding our areas of exploration
Each student will bring one theoretical and one literary text they came across during the course of the semester and which they found illuminating, groundbreaking, or problematic in connection with the themes and issues explored throughout the course. Students will be prepared to present their choice of text and elaborate on the reasons that made them bring the specific texts to the table.
Week 13: Presentation Day
Students will deliver short in-class presentation of their extended essay project in our final meeting. The aim will be for students to receive feedback on their essay-in-progress, so as to fine-tune the argument before the final submission of the essay.