Daniel Mattingly

In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Dave Eggers perceived himself as part of “the lattice,” an internet-like “vast matrix, an army, a whole, each one of us responsible to one another … a human ocean moving as one” (Eggers, 2000, p.211) On the cusp of Web 2.0, the attention-hungry Eggers imagined of a community drawn to his own story by his desire to reflect their lives and create a better world. This utopian project of communicating and sharing is identifiably post-postmodern: seeking humanistic connection predicated on empathy, identification, and respecting differences, in spite of obstacles.
By 2013, however, Eggers’ vision had become more nuanced. In The Circle (2013), while the internet has some innovative, utopian applications for fostering community, knowledge, and social improvements, the novel’s titular company’s agenda has alarming consequences. In pursuing noble goals, under The Circle’s watch a culture of narcissism, manipulation, peer pressure, and voluntary surveillance emerges online and offline. Are such changes mere ‘bugs in the system’ en-route to technological utopia, or exploitative dystopian controls?
Through close analysis of The Circle, this paper argues that the novel’s exploration of negative applications of the internet strikes a note of disquiet about the direction of online culture, 21st century American society, and cyber-capitalism. Considering the novel’s Biblical allusions, conspiracy fiction appropriations, and political links, this paper asks: if, as The Circle proposes, ‘All That Happens Must Be Known,’ (Eggers, 2013, pp.67, 68), and users agree, then what are the consequences for America and Eggers’ post-postmodern literature?

"Circa 2015, in an age of not only ‘Slut Shaming’ and ironic sexist ‘banter’, but also of HBO’s Girls and resurgent feminism, how should academics (re)view David Foster Wallace in relation to issues of gender and the ‘New Sincerity’? This paper shall attempt to explore issues raised by Wallace relating to gender, define the ‘Wallacean Woman’, and signpost areas for future debate.

Can Wallace the beatified literary prodigy with a gift for empathy, be reconciled with both a complex personal biography relating to women, and a body of work that frequently self-consciously wrestles with problematic aspects of contemporary gender politics? To what extent is Wallace’s work influenced by anxieties over American masculinity raised in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s? Is Wallace as much a problematic White Male Narcissist as the phallocentric predecessors he decried, such as Mailer, Roth, and, most notoriously, Updike? Why have critics until recently overlooked Wallace’s works in relation to gender? And, what of Wallace’s addressing the reader as ‘she’?

Addressing these questions, this paper seeks to reframe the debate on Wallace’s post-postmodern credentials, and prompt further reflection on a complex aspect of Wallace’s work."

*****

Supposedly Fun Things: A Colloquium on the Writing of David Foster Wallace

Presentations from: Simon de Bourcier, Xavier Marco Del Pont, Martin Eve, Jen Glennon, Clare Hayes-Brady, Edward Jackson, Daniel Mattingly, Erin Reilly, Joel Roberts, Matt Sangster, Tony Venezia, Iain Williams

Respondent: Professor Geoff Ward (Homerton, Cambridge; presenter of Radio 4 documentary on DFW, Endnotes)

Saturday 7th February 2015 10am-6pm
The Keynes Library (room 114)

School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London, WC1H 0PD

Following his death in 2008 David Foster Wallace’s literary reputation has been firmly consolidated.  We can now talk about a distinct sub-discipline called Wallace Studies as evidenced by the growing number of books, conferences, and journal articles on the writer, and enhanced by the publication of a posthumous novel and the opening up of an archive of his papers at the Harry Ransom Centre.  Wallace’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, has helped to map the critical territory for debates on contemporary literature that have been taking place in both academic and non-academic settings.  This colloquium will contribute to these ongoing conversations.  We are pleased to present a series of short presentations covering  Wallace’s novels, short stories, journalism, and readers.  Professor Geoff Ward (Homerton College, Cambridge) will act as respondent.

Attendance free.  Registration essential.  Refreshments possibly.  For further information contact Tony and Xavier at: infinite.reading@outlook.com

“We were the only two left. Just the two of us, you and me.” –Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris, 2007.

In his three novels to date ––Then We Came to the End (2007), The Unnamed (2010), and the recently Booker Prize long-listed To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (2014)––Joshua Ferris has explored the potential for post-postmodern connections between Self and Other. Considering Self and Other in a 21st century America characterized by communications technology that isolates as often as it connects, post-millennial paranoia, and vague yet urgent spiritual yearnings in a late capitalist landscape, Ferris ultimately reaffirms the humanity of the fractured 21st century Self and the benefits of engaging with atomized Others.

Notions of Self and Other in Ferris’s novels are considered as part of an ongoing post-postmodern process, reflecting upon the difficulties and rewards of individuals overcoming their ingrained skepticism and introspection in order to relate to Others, rejecting isolation for community. By exploring the redemptive potential of collective storytelling, consciously engaging with existential anxiety, and cautiously addressing our digital lives and identities, Ferris continues the work of his post-postmodernist peers in challenging new contexts.

In this paper, through close readings of key passages in each of Ferris’s three novels and the application of post-postmodern critical theory, this paper argues that Ferris’s work is profoundly hopeful in its outlook, seeking to invoke in readers a renewed optimism and desire for human connection.

Five years after David Foster Wallace’s passing, Wallace’s literary legacy remains widely discussed and debated. If the opportunity to reassess Wallace’s career in its totality since his death has resulted in a something resembling a consensus, we may tentatively conclude that Wallace’s oeuvre is best understood and defined by its attempts to revive and renew a commitment to humanism, both in a literary and extra-literary context, in spite of cultural, theoretical, and literary obstacles.
On a narrative and technical level, Wallace’s fiction contends that amidst a culture of distraction, irony, and solipsism, to ‘be’ human, one must consciously, continually ‘choose’ to try and be human, and perceive unknowable others as human also. To commit and re-commit to erring, and questioning one’s own commitment to humanistic empathy and community, is paramount.
The true legacy of Wallace, however, may be measured in the American literature that has consciously been crafted as a continuation or revisions of this tendency. Although barely half a decade has elapsed since his passing, in that time various American writers have contributed to the debates that Wallace was at the forefront of, both pro and contra to the values his works aspired toward.
In this paper, I shall explore key works by writers who have elected to continue aspects of Wallace’s renewed humanism project, while also highlighting where they have deviated from his literary approach. By examining the testator narratives of Junot Diaz, the genre empowered maximalism of Michael Chabon, and the therapeutic domestic turn in the later works of A.M. Homes, this paper intends to address various aspects of the ‘Wallace Legacy’. That legacy, this paper conclude, is the gift of the potential for belief in humanism flexible enough to be adapted and shaped by writers of diverse styles, backgrounds, and social persuasions, for a greater moral good.

As attested to by the anxious international media coverage of the recent U.S. debt ceiling crisis, the United States’ economic instability following the late 2000s financial crisis remains headline news. Anticipating the sense of ongoing crisis, Andrew Dix, Brian Jarvis, and Paul Jenner in The Contemporary American Novel in Context (2011) proposed that “we may…be seeing the emergence of the ‘credit crunch novel’ dedicated to measuring the effects of ‘toxic’ debt on the emotional, cultural and ideological health of the US.”  Subsequently, Andrew Lawson’s “Foreclosure Stories: Neoliberal Suffering in the Great Recession,” postulated “a crisis of representation” in narrative art depicting the crisis due to the inability of both the “financial system and the wider culture” to “recognize and comprehend deeply embedded structures of inequality.” 

Taking the aforementioned novels initial observations as a starting point, by analyzing the novels Union Atlantic, The Privileges, Wanted: Elevator Man, The Financial Lives of the Poets, and A Hologram for the King, this paper shall explore emerging trends within American “crash fiction” thus far. These trends include: a bias toward white middle and upper class experiences; a predisposition toward framing the crisis’ impact from male perspectives; individuals narratives of adaptation to diminished circumstances being allegories for America’s broader ‘humbling’; and the adoption of the languages and practices of finance capitalism into everyday discourse. By considering these novels and trends, this paper is intended to instigate a broader discussion and debate about responses to, and representations of, the current crisis, and its significance to 21st century American culture.

In the fiction of Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz (1968–), the issue of what constitutes ‘home’ for Diaz and his protagonists is not simply defined by a binary of America being their adopted homeland and the Dominican Republic being their native home.

Instead, notions of ‘home’ are far more complex.
In America, the Dominican diaspora is adrift and unsettled; elders are alienated from America by language and customs, while younger generations identify with marginal pop culture to understand their peripheral existence. Back in the Dominican Republic, the subaltern legacy of dictatorship continues, and there are sanitised parts of the island made ‘safe’ for tourists in which native Dominicans risk losing their “ghetto pass” of authenticity if they are seen to stay too long. Between the US and the DR, the notion of a fluid and globalized ‘Americas’ complicates matters further, as does Diaz’s awareness of the history of slavery and empire. Additionally, theoretical deliberations over notions of postmodernism and post-postmodernism further undermine home as a single and stable concept.

This paper shall therefore argue that Junot Diaz’s fiction seeks to address all of these concerns within the rubric of what I have termed ‘homeland insecurity,’ a sense of profound instability and flux about Diaz’s own and his character’s sense of identity as Dominicans and Americans. By closely examining Diaz’s only published novel to date, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and key stories from Drown and This is How You Lose Her, his two collections of short stories, this paper shall contend that Diaz seeks to address these concerns to try and construct a new, pluralistic identity that acknowledges the past while aspiring toward a more humanistic and interconnected future.

By the early-1990s, after nearly 40 years of postmodern fiction, a sense of disillusionment was palpable amongst younger American postmodern novelists. How could they be relevant in the information age? Could ambitious literary novels be ‘socially useful’ to society and not just be for academic analysis? Were postmodern novels increasingly irrelevant as they became canonised academically? Was it possible to acknowledge the influence of elder postmodernist predecessors, while setting a new agenda?

This paper argues that, to forge a ‘new’ relevant and distinct literature for the 21st century, some younger American postmodernists felt that they had to retain postmodern literary themes and techniques, but use them to revive and renew an on-going exploration of the struggle to commit to humanism. Through a highly self-conscious and self-critical literary form, within the context of a postmodern culture sceptical of humanism, from the early 1990s numerous younger American writers have attempted to create a sincere literature with a new found social relevance, ethical conscience, and moral purpose.

By analysing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision (2005), and A.M. Homes’ This Book Will Save Your Life (2006) – this paper shall explore how this attempted revival of humanistic values has emerged as part of a developing paradigm of literary post-postmodernism. In considering each novel’s themes, ideologies, and literary techniques, this paper shall explore some of the debates and controversies surrounding attempts by younger American writers to create socially useful humanist literature in postmodern conditions: a brave ‘renewed’ literary world.

Novelist Dave Eggers (1972- ) has an intriguing relationship with truth, power, and belief. In his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Eggers insists that self-awareness of the artificiality of the text is a form of sincerity and truth, and that only he can act as “the perfect amalgam” for his Generation X readership. However, these claims are undermined by Eggers’ narcissistic conception of his audience being just like him, his perception of himself as a generational locus fatally flawed. Other complications regarding truth and belief emerge in What is the What (2006), Eggers’ fictionalized biography of Sudanese refugee Valentino Deng. By not only taking on and fictionalizing Deng’s story, but also writing it in the first-person in a voice purported to be Deng’s, Eggers opens himself up to scrutiny concerning his validity as Deng’s amanuensis and whether a broadly fictionalised ‘true’ account of Deng’s terrible experiences is appropriate. This paper shall explore both novels, ultimately considering whether ‘truth’ is a relativistic concept in Eggers’ post-postmodern literature.

In his four published novels to date, Jonathan Franzen has engaged at length with concerns surrounding memory and concepts of America as a cultural, societal, and civil entity in an age where the fallibility and failure of memory has become endemic. From his debut, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), to his most recent, Freedom (2010), Jonathan Franzen has displayed increasing awareness of and interest in both the dangerous implications and consequences of fading and undermined memory, and the potential for healing and redemption in uncovering and addressing problematic memories. Although notions of the literary novel as a subversive instrument for social change and moral instruction has been undermined, by addressing America’s relationship with memory Franzen instead fulfils both his desire to reflect and analyse American culture while also reaffirming his aspiration to write highly personal fiction that can resonate with every reader’s own complex relationship with personal/private and public/national/ global memory.  In this paper, I shall examine what I have termed as the ‘ordeal of memory’ running throughout Franzen’s four novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion (1992), The Corrections (2001), and Freedom (2010), considering key narrative devices, themes, interconnections, and historical incidents relating to the trauma of remembrance. I shall argue, that from an initially cynical and pessimistic assessment of America and American society in relation to its attitudes towards memory and learning from its past, Franzen has evolved to a more measured and reflective assessment on how memory acts more than ever as an important point of reference for morality and understanding of the American present in relation to its past. By understanding the evolution of how Franzen understands and depicts of America’s relationship with memory, there is great potential to explore new areas for debate not only in relation to Franzen’s oeuvre, but the works of his contemporaries also.

The authors of The Contemporary American Novel in Context (2011) contend that the all-encompassing notion of ‘American fiction’ has been increasingly challenged in recent years. The designation ‘American Novel’ carries conceptual and political baggage, condensing complex narratives by minority ethnicities into restrictive sub-categories under one universal rubric. However, there are still ways of resisting homogenization and marginalization. Traditional notions of ‘borders’ are inadequate having collapsed in a multicultural and globalized age, but certain key ‘American’ philosophies are still important for writers to respond to and define themselves against. While traditional ‘American’ notions, e.g. freedom, free markets, and social integration, are manifest in texts resisting the ‘one size fits all’ classification, in some respects they are in fact partially re-affirmed (with some additional ‘commentary’). Citing Jeffrey Eugenides’ ‘social-magic realism’ and genre-splicing in Middlesex (2002); Junot Diaz’s use of ‘Spanglish’ in conjunction with American pop-culture in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007); and Gary Shteyngart’s futuristic technology driven satire alongside outsider-immigrant narrative in Super Sad True Love Story (2010), I shall argue that these ‘America(s)’ novels have a twofold function. They serve as a means for writers from social groups outside of the WASP mainstream to reassess their relationship to mainstream American historical and cultural impulses pluralistically; and a platform in which to reconcile difference and tensions by a process of multicultural integration.

This paper considers David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King, analysing it in relation to its attempts to function as a form of reactive historical therapy. In his final novel, Wallace sought to understand troubling social and political changes in America in the last decade under George W. Bush by tracing those changes to what he perceived to be their origins -  the reactionary political climate of the Reagan era 1980’s, particularly in relation to taxes and economics.  My paper shall argue that, using this historical setting and context, Wallace was attempting to write a novel with a twofold therapeutic function utilising the construction and understanding of new and existing interconnected personal and historical American narratives. Firstly, it would work through the economic, social, and political traumas in the 2000’s by identifying their causes in the recent past within a fictional but factually informed narrative. Secondly, it would attempt to address the contentious ‘benefits’  of American social change in the 1960’s and 1970’s when Wallace and his Late Postmodern/Post-postmodern peers were growing up, which can be connected with a desired revival of more altruistic, sincere, and mindful values in fiction in the wake of high-postmodernism.  Using close textual analysis informed by the latest debates in Wallace studies, this paper will shed light on a uniquely talented author’s attempts to address the modern American condition by understanding its past and warning of the implications for its future.

"Following on from Adam Kelly’s essay “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” on the work of the late David Foster Wallace, this conference paper intends to explore how the concept of ‘New Sincerity’ can be developed in the work of one of the most acclaimed and successful younger novelists to follow in Foster Wallace’s wake: Joshua Ferris.
In particular, I shall be considering Ferris’ novels Then We Came to The End and The Unnamed, and seek to reassess these works outside of the standard constraints of their default postmodern classification. My central debate, is considering how and to what degree of success Ferris takes up what Adam Kelly identified as the ‘New Sincerity’s’ interest in restoring and instigating community and disclosure as a form of post-religious secular therapy while also addressing the deliberate ambiguity central to the post-postmodernists.
I shall argue that in ...End, Ferris, more overtly than Foster Wallace, in fact takes a more measured and balanced  consideration of the benefits and pitfalls of community and disclosure than his predecessor, while writing from a position of ambiguity engaging with the reader off the page. By contrast with The Unnamed, Ferris changes his approach dramatically and employs a more hybridised “postmodern-realist” style, remaining ambiguous about his postmodern predecessors but altering his world view substantially.
Befitting the generational differences between Foster Wallace and Ferris, I shall relate these issues to an assessment to Ferris’ narrative voices; the construction of textual loops  and leitmotifs within the texts; the conflicting ‘tones’ of the writing; and his ethical position on the use – or abuse – of community and disclosure for finding solace and meaning.
"

Although previously studied as examples of postmodern literature, this paper shall argue that in fact the two novels to date by American author Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (2007) and The Unnamed (2010), suggest an author drawing upon a much older American literary tradition to critique contemporary America: 19th century transcendentalism. Through a highly allusive on-going dialogue with some of the key writers and thinkers of 19th century American transcendentalism – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson most prominently – Ferris explores three key aspects of contemporary America in light of its past - contemporary spiritual discontent in a secular age; the complexities of a society bound together by its rights to individualism; and the difficulty of relating to others in a highly individualistic and atomized culture. Using examples from both novels, this paper shall consider these aspects in the light of the critical theory model of the ‘New Sincerity’, and place Ferris at the vanguard of a new movement of American writers seeking to revive, adapt and explore a new transcendentalism for newly sincere ends.

""An introductory/survey chapter exploring the key themes, ideas, and responses of recent American fiction to the global financial crisis of 2007-present.

"""In March 2013, over five years after the initial crash in the housing market that marked the beginning of the economic slowdown of the late-2000s and early-2010s, there were still mixed signals about America’s financial stability. On the one hand, despite on-going difficulties in Europe and elsewhere, revisions to American growth forecasts and employment figures for February 2013 suggested that a gradual recovery was at hand, with nonfarm payroll employment increasing by 236,000 in February 2012, and the unemployment rate reducing to 7.7 percent.  However, a failure to agree on how best to deal with the negotiation of a viable plan for the national budget that triggered the implementation of $85 billion dollars in sequester cuts could have a substantial impact upon any recovery, as could the potential collapse of the new stock market bubble with the current “recovery” fueled by “an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains.”  Outside of America, the ongoing Eurozone crisis, with unemployment at a record level of 12%,  suggests that the crisis is, for the time being, here to stay.

In essence, one of the major social, economic, cultural, and political crises of recent times is still very much an ongoing concern, even if a slightly forced rhetoric of uneasy optimism seems to be the party line from the people charged with trying to rectify it. In a prescient anticipation of this ongoing sense of crisis, Andrew Dix, Brian Jarvis, and Paul Jenner in their book The Contemporary American Novel in Context (2010) contend that “we may … be seeing the emergence of the ‘credit crunch novel’” that they speculate would be “dedicated to measuring the effects of ‘toxic’ debt on the emotional, cultural and ideological health of the US.”  Dix, Jarvis, and Jenner do not go into specifics as to how this nascent genre might develop, and loosely situate this new subgenre as representing the latest economic rise and decline in American fiscal fortunes. Subsequently, Andrew Lawson’s 2013 paper “Foreclosure Stories: Neoliberal Suffering in the Great Recession,” posits that key works of recent narrative art (including Paul Auster’s 2010 novel Sunset Park) attempt to “contextualize the human beings” caught up in the aftermath of the economic crisis, only to run into “a crisis of representation” due to an inability in both the “financial system and the wider culture” to “recognize and comprehend deeply embedded structures of inequality.”

While Lawson’s paper provides a crucial first step in placing the emerging civilian narratives of the financial crisis into class-conscious terms, other narratives are starting to emerge that are important and worthwhile to document and reflect upon: narratives from within the intertwined financial and political machines themselves; specific stories of families facing foreclosure, young adults struggling to find work, and of business models failing; and reports of globalization and its discontents. Other narratives of the crash have been under-explored, over simplified, or are absent entirely in the literature published thus far: accurate considerations of the lives of America’s working poor; experiences of the individuals not working in some aspect of the finance industry or government; the perspectives of women, ethnic minorities, children, and senior citizens; the American experience of the crash in a global context; a broader historical account of the causes of the crash and its development over time. Therefore, taking the open-ended theory of Dix et al. as a starting point and bearing in mind Lawson’s investigations, this essay shall examine some key examples of the emerging “crash fiction” published by American writers thus far, start to organize and catalogue the differing approaches to the ongoing crisis, and conclude with further thoughts on how American crash fiction may develop." ""

Overview Description for "The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-first-Century Bust Culture":

"As a topical contribution to the field of American cultural studies, The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-first-Century Bust Culture sheds light on how imaginary works of fiction, film, and television reflect, refract, and respond to the recessionary times specific to the twenty-first century, a sustained period of economic crisis that we believe has earned the title the "Great Recession." Our collection takes as its focus "Bust Culture," a concept we employ to refer to post-crash popular cultural, specifically the kind mass produced by multinational corporations in the age of media conglomeration, which is inflected by diminishment, influenced by scarcity, and infused with anxiety. The multidisciplinary contributors collected herein examine mass culture not typically included in discussions of the financial meltdown, from disaster films to reality TV hoarders, the horror genre to reactionary representations of women, Christian right radio to Batman, television characters of color to graphic novels and literary fiction. The collected essays treat our busted culture as a seismograph that registers the traumas of collapse, and locate their pop artifacts along a spectrum of ideological fantasies, social erasures, and profound anxieties inspired by the Great Recession. What they discover from these unlikely indicators of the recession is a mix of regressive, progressive, and bemused texts in need of critical translation.""

As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by economic globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization, writers and artists have addressed the problem of representing the economy with a new sense of political urgency. Anxieties over who controls capitalism have thus been translated into demands upon literature, art, and mass media to develop strategies of representation that can account for capitalism’s power.

Reading Capitalist Realism presents some of the latest and most sophisticated approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the “realism” of austerity, privatization, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production. Even as critics have sought to locate a new aesthetic mode that might consider and move beyond theorizations of the postmodern, this volume contends that narrative realism demands renewed scrutiny for its ability to represent capitalism’s latest scenes of enclosure and indebtedness.

Ranging across fiction, nonfiction, television, and film, the essays collected here explore to what extent realism is equipped to comprehend and historicize our contemporary economic moment and what might be the influence or complicity of the literary in shaping the global politics of lowered expectations. Including essays on writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Lorrie Moore, Jess Walter, J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Ali Smith, Russell Banks, William Vollmann, and William Gibson, as well as examinations of Hollywood film productions and The Wire television series, Reading Capitalist Realism calls attention to a resurgence of realisms across narrative genres and questions realism’s ability to interrogate the crisis-driven logic of political and economic “common sense.”

'Brave New Worlds' is a cross disciplinary conference showcasing contemporary postgraduate research in the Arts and Humanities. It offers students an opportunity to present their research in a supportive academic environment and to publicise their research to new audiences.

Papers will interrogate the thesis of Aldoux Huxley's Brave New World (1932) by exploring innovative ways in which the concept may be applied to research in the Arts and Humanities.

"'Crossing borders / Pushing boundaries' is a cross disciplinary conference showcasing contemporary postgraduate research in the Arts and Humanities. It offers students an opportunity to present their research in a supportive academic environment and to publicise their research to new audiences.

Proceedings co-edited with Heidei Yeandle and Jed Chandler."

I was responsible for editing the following papers:

"Pushing the boundaries between German history and the war on terror in Bryan Singers Valkyrie" – Anna White

"Adapting Feninmore Coopers The Spy for BBC Radio" – Leslie McMurty

"Living the Gimmick: The Fractured Identities of Professional Wrestlers" – Caitlyn Downs

Introduction to American Literature and Culture

"This module offers an interdisciplinary survey of American literature and culture from the Nineteenth century to the present day, examining the construction of a specifically American identity in relation to the sweeping social, technological and economic changes which characterize the American experience. The module as a whole explores American culture and literature in a lively and interdisciplinary manner, reading the search for an American Self as an attempt to come to terms with the bewildering transformation of the world, and the position of the individual within it."

Reading List 2016:

* Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus, Melvin Tolson, Sandra Cisneros [selected poems and extracts for introductory lecture]

* Edgar Allan Poe - 'The Fall of the House of Usher & Other Stories' [various short stories, Gothic fiction]

* Willa Cather - 'My Antonia' [modernism, regionalism]

* Mark Twain - 'Huckleberry Finn' [Southern literature, racial politics, vernacular style]

* Emily Dickinson [various poems, modernism]

* John Dos Passos - 'Manhattan Transfer' [modernism, the city, urban space, cinema, advertising, industrial age]

* Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Stirling A. Brown [selected poems as part of 'Harlem Renaissance']

* Don DeLillo - 'White Noise' [postmodernism, simulara, mass media, waste, history]"

"Literary works open up different meanings depending on the questions we ask them and the assumptions we bring to them. Literary meaning is in continual transformation. This module examines some of the ways in which this occurs through critical reading and intertextual revision. The first half of the module looks at two works, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula, that have been plurally interpreted by critics; the second half of the module considers the transformation of narrative and ideology in the 'intertextual' revision of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre by Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. The course looks at how meaning in literature is transformed and how it transforms the ways in which we see the world."

For this module, I am teaching two-seminars per-week.

This module is the companion module to HUPM03. It takes a pluri-disciplinary approach to understanding the impacts of war on society and vice-versa. The module evaluates the ways in which conflict changes and reshapes society and analyses the problems of war, its representations and its social outcomes. 'War' in thus not viewed solely in terms of military history, but rather through a broader context of changing social, economic and cultural trends both as a motor for change and as part of those broader changes. The module is taught over a ten week period. The weekly two hour sessions include at least an hour of seminar style ‘teaching’, to make sure that there is ample time for discussions, questions, student presentations, etc. Hence, it is expected of all students to read the compulsory reading for each session beforehand, so that meaningful discussions can take place.

My contribution to the 2015 version of the module was running a seminar for one week in which students would discuss two contemporary novels depicting war in unconventional ways. Students discussed:

* depictions and facets of contemporary warfare in contemporary fiction, such as depictions of warfare in relation to (and conceived as) 'business', war as arcane bureaucracy, the experience of modern warfare being centered around boredom, and debates over the consumption and 'packaging' of war as news and media spectacle;

* the different perspectives on war offered by writers who were military veterans as opposed to non-veterans;

* the political undertones of contemporary war texts;

* how differing stylistic approaches altered the students perceptions of conflict and the structures of power and influence surrounding war.

2015 Seminar Reading List

*"Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain

*"Fobbit" by David Abrams.

In this module you will examine the history of the international system from the end of the Second World War to the present day. It will provide an examination of the origins of the Cold War, how the two superpowers managed their relationship during the Cold War and an analysis of some of the key features of the post-Cold War world. We begin by assessing the rise of the USA and USSR and the emergence of deterrence. The failure of the US policy of containment in Vietnam and the emergence of tripolarity and detente in the 1970s then follows. By the beginning of the 1980s the superpowers relations had worsened and it was the time of the Second Cold War. Yet within ten years the Cold War that had dominated international relations since 1945 would be over. Why did it end, and who won will be questions for you to answer.

The module will then examine the challenges facing the international system in the aftermath of the Cold War. Challenges ranging from failed states and military intervention to the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia, and we conclude by asking, in the post 9/11 era, are we facing a clash of civilizations?

This interdisciplinary, team-taught module offers students the opportunity to study the 1960s, widely regarded as
one of the most complex, contradictory, and controversial decades in twentieth century American life, as reflected
in the prevailing historical, political, literary and cultural climate. The decade began with high hopes for a more
democratic United States under John F. Kennedy, with liberal triumphs and civil rights gains, yet ended in discord
and disillusionment, as many Americans, shaken by urban unrest and assassinations, and divided by the escalation
of the war in Vietnam, believed the fate of the nation’s institutions and ideology hung in the balance. Starting by
analysing the consensus that existed in the 1950s, the module will contour America’s break with cultural conformity
during the 1960s, examining such topics as the major domestic achievements of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society; Cold War politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Civil Rights movement from sit-ins to
voting rights activism to Black Power; Vietnam and the anti-war and youth counter-cultural movements; liberalism and
the revival of conservative partisanship; the roles of intellectuals and artists, and literary and cultural responses to the changes and challenges of the decade. Drawing on the central developments of the decade, and the competing uses
to which 60s narratives have been put, this module will offer students the opportunity to study many hotly debated
issues, critically engaging their nature and their significance, and making ample use of a fantastic variety of original
sources and visual material, including works of history, literature, art, photography, media, popular music, and cinema.

My contributions to the module were lectures and seminars on the Civil Rights Movement from MLK to Black Power, and Popular Music in the 1960s. The seminars concerned significant primary documents for both topics - MLK's "I Have a Dream" oratory and Malcolm X's pivotal "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech from 1964 for the Civil Rights seminar; and crucial essays and reportage from the frontline of American popular music for the music seminar, particularly John Sinclair of the MC5's  “Rock and Roll Is a Weapon of Cultural Revolution,”
The New Yorker, “A Fleeting, Wonderful Moment of ‘Community,’” and Michael Lydon's account of the Altamont Speedway concert fiasco, “The Rolling Stones – At Play in the Apocalypse”.

American slavery has always been the subject of debate, both moral and intellectual. This module will introduce students to questions which have been central to these debates. For instance, why were Africans enslaved, but not Native Americans, or poor Europeans? What was the psychological effect of slavery upon the enslaved? What was the role of enslaved women? How did the enslaved experience religion? What was the significance of the folklore of the enslaved? Those taking the course will be asked to consider the importance of oral history and the study of culture. Students will also look at nineteenth-century discourse on slavery; in other words, the arguments of white abolitionists and their pro-slavery opponents. Finally, students will look at the role that the enslaved played in their own emancipation, as the Civil War raged around them. Throughout the course, students will be asked to consider ideas of race, class and gender, which are crucial to understanding slavery, as well as the modern world.

This module addresses specific aspects of African American cultural history, comprehensively surveying the Black experience within the United States from slavery to the present day. It considers Africa, the slave trade, the origins of slavery in the United States, slave religion and resistance, Reconstruction, segregation, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, migration and the city, Marcus Garvey, pan-Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights era, Malcolm X and Black Power as well as aspects of Black female history, the black family, and black culture and music. The module investigates how not only race, but also class, gender and religion have shaped the development of African American history.

Specific themes are leadership, the relationship between ideas and social context and the spectrum of black thinking from conservative to radical traditions.

Week 1
Lecture 1 – Introduction to African American History and the Concept of Race
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Week 2
Lecture 2 – The Slave Trade, the Development of Slavery and Racism in North America, and the Historiography of the Antebellum Slave Community

Seminar 1 – Harriet Jacobs and the Experience of Enslaved Women
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Week 3
Lecture 3 – Enslaved Families and the Folklore of the Enslaved

Seminar 2 – Religion and Resistance

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Week 4
Lecture 4 – Reconstruction and the Rise of ‘Jim Crow’

Seminar 3 – Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Lynching

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Week 5
Lecture 5 – Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois

Seminar 4 – W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and the Question of Race
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Week 6
Lecture 6 – The Birth of the Ghetto, Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism

Seminar 5 – The Harlem Renaissance
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Week 7
Lecture 7 – Martin Luther King, Jr and Civil Rights

Seminar 6 – Martin Luther King, Jr, Religion, and Nonviolent Resistance
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Week 8
Lecture 8 – Malcolm X and Black Power

Seminar 7 – Stokely Carmichael and Black Power
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Week 9
Lecture 9 – The Music of African America

Seminar 8 – Essay Skills
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Week 10
Lecture 10 – African Americans in Contemporary Society

Seminar 9 – Exam Revision Session

""""""Introduction to American Literature and Culture

"This module offers an interdisciplinary survey of American literature and culture from the Nineteenth century to the present day, examining the construction of a specifically American identity in relation to the sweeping social, technological and economic changes which characterize the American experience. The module as a whole explores American culture and literature in a lively and interdisciplinary manner, reading the search for an American Self as an attempt to come to terms with the bewildering transformation of the world, and the position of the individual within it."

Reading List 2013:
* Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus, Melvin Tolson, Sandra Cisneros [selected poems and extracts for introductory lecture]
* Edgar Allan Poe - 'The Fall of the House of Usher & Other Stories' [various short stories, Gothic fiction]
* Willa Cather - 'My Antonia' [modernism, regionalism]
* Mark Twain - 'Huckleberry Finn' [Southern literature, racial politics, vernacular style]
* Emily Dickinson [various poems, modernism]
* John Dos Passos - 'Manhattan Transfer' [modernism, the city, urban space, cinema, advertising, industrial age]
* Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Stirling A. Brown [selected poems as part of 'Harlem Renaissance']
* Don DeLillo - 'White Noise' [postmodernism, simulara, mass media, waste, history]"""""

"""""Contemporary American Fiction

"This interdisciplinary module explores the role of the writer in America in the Twenty first century, and seeks to account for the seemingly paradoxical energy of the novel in an age of apparent exhaustion.""

Reading List for 2014:

- 'Less Than Zero' by Bret Easton Ellis ['Brat Pack' literature; Minimalism; MFA Program Era]
- 'In the Country of Last Things' by Paul Auster [Postmodernism]
- 'Girlfriend in a Coma' by Douglas Coupland [Postmodernism; Consumerism; Apocalypse]
- 'This Book Will Save Your Life' by A.M. Homes [Postmodernism/Post-Postmodernism]
- 'What I l Loved' by Siri Hustvedt [Postmodernism]
- 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer [Trauma; 9/11 fiction; experimental fiction; postmodernism]
- 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz [Post-Postmodernism; Globalized American Novel; Comic Book Realism]
- 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy [Apocalypse Fiction]
- 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan [Post-Postmodernism; Experimental Fiction; Technology]

Reading List for 2013:

- 'Less Than Zero' by Bret Easton Ellis
- 'In the Country of Last Things' by Paul Auster
- 'Mao II' by Don DeLillo [Postmodernism; Terrorism; Media]
- 'Girlfriend in a Coma' by Douglas Coupland
- 'What I Loved' by Siri Hustvedt
- 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer
- 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy
- 'American Wife' by Curtis Sittenfeld
- 'A Visit from the Goon Squad' by Jennifer Egan

Reading List for 2012:

- 'Less Than Zero' by Bret Easton Ellis
- 'In the Country of Last Things' by Paul Auster
- 'Mao II' by Don DeLillo
- 'Girlfriend in a Coma' by Douglas Coupland
- 'What I l Loved' by Siri Hustvedt
- 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer
- 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy
- 'American Wife' by Curtis Sittenfeld
- 'And Then We Came to the End' by Joshua Ferris [Post-Postmodernism; Collective Voice]""""

Doing Time: American Prison Culture of the 20th and 21st Centuries Module Handbook

The penal system in the USA has grown steadily throughout the twentieth century and the dramatic number of Americans incarcerated since the 1980s has been widely documented. By 2008, for the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults were behind bars. Latinos are today twice as likely as whites to receive a prison sentence and for African Americans, it is six times the white incarceration rate. This final year module will explore one of the largest prison structures in the world with characteristics that are often deemed to be unique in the Western world (racial bias, use of the death penalty, the prison industrial complex etc.). As a result, some specifically American cultural responses have thrived and prison (pop) culture has grown into a recognised genre.

This module therefore aims:
• To provide a critical overview of the key debates and concepts inherent in American Prison Studies.
• To challenge students to master the study of new (pop) cultural formats that they may previously not have covered (whether music, poetry or film etc.).
• To encourage students to explore the US in different “exceptional” ways than they may have done previously (i.e. using the prison system as a lightning rod for discussing American race, class, gender etc).

The work of scholars such as H Bruce Franklin, Auli Ek and Peter Caster suggests the prison memoir is no longer merely a subgenre of American autobiography and prison films are no longer a subgenre of action or crime films.  Prison texts are now an established genre, receiving critical attention in their own right under an interdisciplinary rubric of “Prison Studies”.  This course will focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and draw on a number of different cultural forms to explore various angles of the prison system itself (economically and politically) as well as the prison experience more individually (including notions of redemption, resistance, representation, and the preservation of self-hood and identity).  Students will enter into discussions using primary texts varying from television shows (such as Orange is the New Black), music (by incarcerated gangsta rappers), poetry and art (from Guantanamo Bay prisoners), film (such as The Shawshank Redemption) and fiction (by authors such as Chester Himes). These texts will be supported by historical, sociological and philosophical critical readings (for example, Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish).

Module handbook for the module '"Mi Raza Primero!': a Cultural Study of Mexican Americans in the 20th/21st Centuries'

This module aims:
• To reveal the complexity and diversity of Ethnic Studies in the USA beyond African Americans.
• To provide a critical overview of the key issues and debates at stake within the academic field of Chicano Studies, revealing the ways in which Chicanos have contributed to the social fabric of American throughout the 20th century in both “exceptional” and international ways.
• To expose students to an interdisciplinary field of study that uses History, Law, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, Literature and Ethnomusicology, and a host of other disciplines in order to study and interpret the complex and diverse experiences of Chicana/os.
• To provide opportunities for students to study beyond “traditional” forms of cultural expression. In other words, to consider literary and filmic forms but also visual art (particularly in the form of murals), folk music, and photography.

In summary, we will explore in interdisciplinary ways, the crucial role that Mexican Americans have undertaken in US History and Culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. The opening lecture of this course will provide an overview of the history of Mexican Americans pre 20th century, from the arrival of Spanish explorers in Mexico in the 1500s, through to the Texas Revolution and the Mexican American War. However in historical terms, the bulk of the module will commence with the enormous waves of Mexican immigrants arriving in the US at the turn of the century, and work through to the 2010 Arizona state decision to outlaw Chicano Studies in schools on the grounds that such courses “advocate ethnic solidarity”. The module will place a considerable emphasis on the Chicano Movement which fought for Mexican American recognition and civil rights in the 1960s and 70s.
Students will enter into analytical discussions on a number of topics and themes using a different cultural text each week to do so. For example, these texts may include novels by Sandra Cisneros, poetry and memoir by Luis J. Rodriguez, the murals of Chicano Park in San Diego, photography and art by Harry Gamboa Jr., or films like Salt of the Earth.

The weekly themes are likely to include:
- Chicanos & Civil Rights (notably the Chicano Movement)**
- Chicanos & the Political System
- Chicanos & the News Media
- Chicanos & the Economy (particularly in terms of agricultural labour force)
- Chicanos & the Family (particularly the role of women)
- Chicanos & Education (including English/Spanish language)
- Chicanos & the Criminal Justice System (including the Mexican Mafia in the US)
- Chicanos & the Immigration Debate

Module Handbook for the Second Year Undergraduate Module "From Reagan to Roseanne and Obama to Osama: A Cultural Study of the USA since 1980”

This is a second year module that introduces students to a number of key themes and issues in America since 1980, (particularly in view of the upcoming year abroad for some students). The course will use popular cultural texts to develop an understanding of America at this time. The course will offer evidence of contemporary American identities, cultural politics, and representations, as well as thinking about these terms in conceptual ways. To explore cultural representations and the everyday lives of Americans leads, in interdisciplinary ways, to a consideration of some of the most compelling debates in the contemporary American frame: debates about the increasing power of the media and market, social and economic inequality, gender politics, immigration and ethnicity, democracy and the “colour line.”

MODULE AIMS
• To examine a number of key themes and issues in modern American culture and society
• To develop students’ ability to work and think in an interdisciplinary way
• To encourage critical and analytical skills through the close study of a variety of contemporary American texts and practices
• To develop skills in oral and written communication

LEARNING OUTCOMES
The module has the following Learning Outcomes:
• A knowledge and understanding of certain key issues in recent American life
• The ability to analyse a variety of popular American cultural and sociological texts
• The ability to contextualize these texts in terms of contemporary American society and politics
• A general grasp of the approaches involved in interdisciplinary study
• The capacity to take responsibility for learning and intellectual development
• Skills of independent research and written expression

This module will enable students to hone the skills required to undertake research in literary studies and which are necessary to present the results of such research through writing and oral presentation. Students are encouraged to think about how to select appropriate methodologies from a range of possible choices, and consider how these methodologies can be used to shape the forms of research undertaken.

This course analyses the various meanings of freedom specifically in America both in contemporary settings and with close regard to its historical contexts, but also in its wider, philosophical senses. What is a ‘free’ society ? How close does the United States come to living up to the ideals it so consistently professes to possess? Is a free society one where the individual is at liberty to do as s/he pleases ? Does the existence of liberty necessarily entail attendant economic or racial inequalities ? What are the limits on such freedom ? Does citizenship entail a commitment to duties as well as an expectation of rights ? Is it desirable or, indeed, possible to create a free society ? What role does government play in the lives of the individual ? How much can, indeed should, the individual be truly 'free' ? What does liberty mean to the US both domestically and externally in the wake of September 11 ? More specifically, the course analyses various social issues – such as gay marriage, abortion, freedom of speech, capital punishment – in the context of what have been dubbed ‘the culture wars’ dividing America. Despite these divisions is there a shared commitment to ‘liberty’ that unites Americans regardless of class, race and region ?

The module will introduce students to various histories of cinema and the ways that cinema history can be constructed. Through an exploration of a range of national and international cinema movements and styles, students will examine the significance of cultural and historical contexts and their relationship to film texts. Key factors, including economic, social, cultural, political and geographical influences, will be analysed to explore significant moments of film history such as pre-cinema, German Expressionism, the Hollywood studio system, Post-Classical Hollywood, ‘Third Cinema’, the French New Wave and the rise of 'Indiewood'.

THE MODULE

The module centres upon the films and the aesthetic, industrial and institutional practices of Hollywood during the first half of the twentieth century, and critically examines a history of debates about the Hollywood film and its cultural significance. More specifically, the module deals with the ‘classical’ period of Hollywood film-making, which ran from the late 1920s to the 1950s, during which decade Hollywood and its practices underwent fundamental change.

Study will include consideration of:

Hollywood’s studio system and star systems, their economic and institutional determination and their relation to audiences and to modernity.
The movement from silent film to sound cinema, the institutionalisation of censorship and the relation of films and institutional practices to broader cultural, historical, and political shifts.
The formation and constitution of particular genres and their relation to ethnic and gendered representations and audiences.
The post- World War II late period of classical Hollywood, and the break-up of the studio system.


THE MODULE AIMS ARE:

To develop skills in reading Hollywood films as aesthetic, cultural, and industrial/economic products.
To use concepts and methodologies from film and cultural theory to explore the meanings of Hollywood and of its films
To advance skills in the critical, cultural, and historical analysis of films and other media texts.
By the end of the module, you should be able to analyse films a variety of critical perspectives, and to identify the specificity of the Hollywood film within twentieth century culture.

Module overview
This module focuses upon the institution of slavery from its origins in the colonial South to its collapse during the American Civil War. It explores the growth of the plantation system, the changing nature of the master-slave relationship, and the emergence of a distinctive African American culture. The module aims to provide a detailed understanding of the slave experience and of the impact of slavery on the society and culture of the Old South as well as an appreciation of the continuing sensitivity surrounding the legacy of the South’s ‘peculiar institution’.