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Module THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL: RADICAL CONTEMPORARY LITERATURES

Module code: EN6005
Credits: 15
Semester: Year-Long
Department: ENGLISH
International: No
Overview Overview
 

This module begins with the understanding that current global systems of capitalist regulation and control our psychic and affective realities to determine the boundaries between what we perceive as rational, intelligible, and transmissible and what we conceive as unrecognizable, illegible, irrelevant and valueless. In this module we will explore a range of experimental, intergeneric texts that address the models of self and community imposed by such systems. Examining work by writers and artists whose backgrounds place them outside dominant discourses of power and normativity, we will consider how innovations across word- and image-based media propose alternative models of self and counter-narratives of history, addressing the relationships between cultural production and personhood, and between form, bodies and politics. Importantly, then, the materials covered on the module will require us not simply to think abstractly about language and textual form but to attend to social examples of radical life and to explore connections between constructions of text, self, and history, on the one hand, and the intersubjective and social movements that trace paths to notions of ancestry, belonging, rootedness, “race,” and citizenship, on the other. Texts under discussion may include Laurent Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays, Bessie Head’s Maru, Zanele Muholi’s Only Half the Picture, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let me be Lonely and Citizen, Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, and the image-text photographic work of Carrie Mae Weems.

Open Learning Outcomes
 
Open Teaching & Learning methods
 
Open Assessment
 
Open Autumn Supplementals/Resits
 
Open Timetable
 
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